SteveF’s conclusion is that once allowance has been made for three naturally-occurring influences – volcanic aerosols, the ~11-year solar cycle and the el Niño/la Niña cycles – the HadCRUt4 warming rate from 1979-1996 was six times faster than from 1997-2012. In the abstract, to allow for uncertainties, he cautiously reduces this to three times faster.

Even if one were to take the unadjusted HadCRUt4 data, the rate of warming from 1979-1996 was more than twice as fast as the rate from 1997-2012.

I decided to look not only at HadCRUt4, as SteveF did, but also at the two satellite datasets, RSS and UAH. RSS showed warming at 0.7 Cº/century from 1979-1996 and cooling at almost 0.1 Cº/century from 1997-2012.

UAH, however, in contrast to both HadCRUt4 and RSS, showed warming in the later period, 1997-2012, that was thrice as fast as the warming of the earlier period, 1979-1996.

SteveF’s essay takes no account of the most substantial medium-term natural cycle that seems to influence global temperatures: the Pacific Decadal Oscillation. The cycles of that great Oscillation tend to exercise a warming influence for about 30 years followed by a cooling influence for about 30 years. This cyclical influence is visible throughout the HadCRUt4 global temperature record since 1850.

There was a remarkably sharp transition from the “cooling” to the “warming” phase of the PDO at the beginning of 1976 and a transition back to “cooling” late in 2001.

The HadCRUt4 warming rate from 1976-2001 was equivalent to almost 1.8 Cº/century (compared with warming at just 1.1 Cº/century from 1979-1996), but from 2002 to the present HadCRUt4 shows cooling at a rate equivalent to almost 0.5 Cº/century (compared with warming at almost 0.5 Cº/century from 1997-2012).

Much of the fall in the warming rate identified by SteveF, therefore, appears to be attributable to the PDO. It would be interesting to adjust the global instrumental temperature anomaly record not only for volcanic aerosols, solar cycles and el Niños but also for the cycles of the PDO, but that is above my present pay-grade.

What is far from clear is the influence, if any, from CO2. Its influence must be very small, for it seems easily overwhelmed by natural influences such as the PDO and the three phenomena studied by SteveF.

During the three “warming” phases of the PDO that are visible in the HadCRUt4 instrumental record since 1850, the warming rates were as follows: 1860-1880 less than 1.0 Cº/century; 1910-1940 1.4 Cº/century; and 1976-2001 1.8 Cº/century.

Superficially, there appears to be an inexorable and strikingly near-linear increase in the warming rates during successive “warming” phases of the PDO. Might this increase be attributable to the monotonic increase in CO2 over recent decades?

If the increase in warming rates were to continue, perhaps as a result of the growing warming influence from CO2, the warming from about 2040-2070 might be equivalent to 2.2 Cº/century; and from 2100-2130 2.6 Cº/century.

It would not be until around 2160-2190 that the warming rate would reach the IPCC’s currently-projected central estimate of 3.0 Cº/century. And, even then, the mean centennial rate after allowing for the “cooling” phases of the PDO would be considerably less.

However, the apparently tidy 1.0 to 1.4 to 1.8 Cº/century-equivalent increase in the rates of global warming during the “warming” phases of the PDO may not be attributable to CO2 at all. The true cause may be another and more sinister man-made phenomenon: Orwellian data revisionism.

Late in 2009, after the first Climategate emails had been sprung on a naively unsuspecting world, Roger Harrabin of the BBC, an acquiescent true-believer in the global-warming Party Line, was told by his superiors that for the sake of what little is left of the BBC’s reputation he should – just for once – ask Professor Jones of the University of East Anglia some critical questions about the temperature record.

Harrabin had never before stopped to think about whether the Party Line was true. That is the trouble with the Party Line: as Orwell points out in 1984, it is intended as a substitute for independent thought – or for any thought.

So he did not know what questions to ask. He asked me for help in framing suitable critical questions.

I told him to ask Jones whether there had been any statistically-significant global warming over the previous 15 years. He thought that was an absurd question. The Party Line said warming was occurring at a rate unprecedented in human history.

I told him to ask the question anyway. To his astonishment, Jones – albeit testily – admitted there had been no warming statistically distinguishable from zero for 15 years.

I also told Harrabin to ask Jones whether the rates of warming during the three “warming” phases of the PDO in the instrumental record since 1850 were statistically distinguishable from one another.

Harrabin got a further surprise when Jones told him that the three rates could not be distinguished from one another, statistically speaking. On the then HadCRUt3 version of the global dataset, the rates of warming were equivalent to 1.0, 1.6 and 1.7 Cº/century respectively. The uncertainties in the data during the first of the three periods, 1860-1880, were so large that the rate could not be distinguished from that of the later two periods.

Our CO2 emissions could not have influenced the second period of PDO-driven warming, but we could in theory have influenced the third. Yet in the HadCRUt3 dataset the two periods showed warming within 0.1 Cº/century of one another: far too little an increase to be statistically significant.

At a climate conference in Cambridge a few years ago, I asked Jones whether, given that the global warming rates in the three “warming” phases of the PDO could not be distinguished from one another statistically speaking, any anthropogenic influence was yet discernible in the temperature record. He said there was a discernible influence, but did not say where or how large it was.

Not long afterwards, and perhaps not coincidentally, he produced HadCRUt4. Suddenly the rates of warming during the second and third PDO “warming” phases were changed from 1.6 and 1.7 Cº/century respectively to 1.4 and 1.8 Cº/century respectively.

As with other such instances of data revisionism in the terrestrial datasets, the later period was changed very little because the satellites were watching and prevented cheating. But the record in the earlier period was pushed downwards, artificially steepening the apparent warming over the 20th century. It is as though we knew better than those who took the earlier measurements what measurements they ought to have recorded, all over the world.

Disentangling the true contribution of CO2 to warming from not only the numerous natural influences but also from the effects of data revisionism is near impossible. We shall have to wait and see. The one fact that is already clear, however, is that the warming rate predicted by the models on whose output the climate scare is founded is proving to be a hefty exaggeration.

208 thoughts on “How data revisionism hypes global warming”

Your Lordship:
Thanks for the backstory on the sudden discovery of cooling in the first half of the 20th & last half of the 19th centuries, previously thought to have shown recovery (ie, warming) from the LIA cooling.
I wonder if GISS followed the Had Crew’s lead in this archaeodatalogical revisionism or made the same discovery all by themselves?

I don’t consider myself a conspiration theorist, therefore I refuse to believe that there is conspiration to adjust past temperature records in a way favorable to global warming alarmism.
The fact that values changed in such way is no proof. In real science, we accept when results change in unfavorable way as long as we know they are closer to reality.
Of course if somebody found that they intentionally changed data processing towards less precise but politically more favorable, that would be a different story. But I’m not aware of any evidence for that.

The missing piece of the puzzle is how they worked their magic. I’d love to see a recipe for turning Hadcrut3 into Hadcrut4, that would tell us a lot about what was happening. If the details of how to do this are not public domain, they should be.

The one fact that is already clear, however, is that the warming rate predicted by the models on whose output the climate scare is founded is proving to be a hefty exaggeration.
It’s not just an obvious exaggeration, it’s just plain wrong.

“What is far from clear is the influence, if any, from CO2. Its influence must be very small, for it seems easily overwhelmed by natural influences such as the PDO and the three phenomena studied by SteveF.”
I don’t see the logic of that. In fact if the cooling since 2001 can be explained by the PDO, then removing its effect would enhance the role of GHG forcing.
But in any case, it seems quite possible that the effect over decades of GHG forcing is comparable to that of ENSO, PDO etc. The difference is that they are cyclic; GHG forcing just goes on and on.

The horror of this whole global warming scam is simply that if all the money and effort spent on “proving agw” (no caps intended) we could have learned much about the climate and weather.
Thank you for your efforts My Lord.

“The true cause may be another and more sinister man-made phenomenon: Orwellian data revisionism.”
You can strike the “may” for most of the core AGW movements technical arm. The digression here isn’t that data is cherry-picked and corrupt but the actual reasons for AGW belief systems (leftist policy design) aren’t mentioned in guise of keeping the point “technical” or “about science” etc. Many skeptics can’t seem to publicly accept the basic truth, AGW is about a left-wing social agenda not based on a serious science discipline. The perpetrators (core warmers and media arm) have to pretend but skeptics are facilitators when they chronically exclude motives from their technical presentations and comments. Why the data was distorted is main point of the story. This is why warming agenda’s advance, the avoidance and potentially divisive conversation among skeptics regarding why AGW was massively promoted on a global basis. All the spaghetti graphs in the world aren’t going to save you from tyranny if you support this convention.
AGW is about Orwellian tyranny which is bigger than data revisionism. Start with the political ID of who you are questioning and will become very clear and very fast; Roger Harrabin of the BBC. He’s a run of the mill greenbot activist journalist. The BBC speaks for itself, Orwellian leftist often enough. The technical writers of the IPCC opinions? Overwhelmingly left-wing and the higher you move up the political authority and policy statement arm the more left-wing it becomes.
I’m for wiping out the Chinese Wall (U.S. Financial term, divide between bankers and conflicted investment divisions, wall of silence between them on self-interested activity) on politics and technical people of all types. Everyone must disclose their politics commenting on AGW, skeptics and warmers alike. That will get closer to the truth and save trillions of electrons in the process.

I find it interesting that, apart from a couple of misinterpreted emails, the evidence for conspiracy is non-existent yet it comes up time and time again. The rejection of AGW here is often ideological rather than scientific, as witnessed by cwon14’s unsubstantiated rant. I’m interested in the fact that the less secure a man is, the more likely he is to have extreme prejudice.
Bias watch: lifelong Conservative voter, Daily Telegraph reader.

Nick Stokes says:
June 15, 2013 at 10:46 pm
Since the net forcing you imagine can’t and hasn’t been quantified it has little science relevance. Warmers bet the farm on model predictions and lost. They did it at the time because it was politically expedient not that it was good science. It was a desperate movement from inception, again based on political lust not science. Sorry, no get out of jail free card for the movement activists.The movement bet on warmer temp data and fear relating to higher co2, live with it. That there has never been a co2 warming finger print based on proxy results should have ended this discussion long ago. The last 17 years really isn’t really that important from a science view but that reflects the whole sham of warmer claims more than reciprocal illogic of critics. This is where warmers dragged the public to begin with.
Harmful AGW based on co2 was always politically motivated science fiction, the lust to regulate and tax carbon (many side motivations as well). The quantification attempt on co2 failed in a spectacular way. The more important question is how we aren’t going to let other pseudoscience fraud for political aims become the norm. That’s the important question as the AGW mania is refuted. Nothing should be forgotten or forgiven, core warmers should be in the dock. They didn’t do it for “science” or Gaia. Their political culture is what is on trial.

@Kasuha. In research (regardless of the discipline), it is not rare to find studies that fiddle with values in order to support otherwise untenable hypotheses. This does not constitute conspiracy. It simply is bad science and there are truckloads of it.

The cumulative influence of high solar activity in the 20th century is also a factor in the warming trends. It stayed high until 1996 after apparently peaking in 1985, so this would also mean that the 3 rates of warming since ~1850 might be different.

I think they need to keep global temperatures going up by fair means or foul so that the subsidy regime can continue unabated. Read this for some enlightenment over how the subsidy regime flourishes here in United Kingdom. £100,000 or so subsidy per job per annum.http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/energy/windpower/10122850/True-cost-of-Britains-wind-farm-industry-revealed.html
“True cost of Britain’s wind farm industry revealed
Every job in Britain’s wind farm industry is effectively subsidised to the extent of £100,000 per year, The Telegraph can disclose. ”
Some gravytrain that.

I bet the biggest cause for the recent temp flatlining is the worldwide saturation of urbanization in cities and towns where thermometers are placed. The temp of Tokyo has risen by 3 degC over 100 years (Miyake island, only 180 km apart, shows no temp trend), but in these years even Tokyo shows very little temp change, as in many big and medium cities all over Japan.
Another cause may be the situation where THEY can no longer adjust the surface temps freely, because of the careful eyes from many people, after Climategate scandals.

Kasuha says:
June 15, 2013 at 10:32 pm
People behaving in concert to their political cultures may appear to be a “conspiracy” but that isn’t a proper word. I would reserve that word for people who prearrange a selfish outcome for any motivated purpose, in secret. It’s not the social bias results can’t worse than a conspiracy, impacting many if not more at times. Billions have been malinvested due to the AGW movement in a world where people starve, carbon energy has a far cost than it otherwise would without the green domination and the AGW facility at hand.
While I don’t believe the word “conspiracy” is proper nor is the knee-jerk “you’re a conspiracy theorist” if you question the political ID of advocates. While we are dealing with vast populations with many political contradictions along the way I’m sure in a general way AGW advocacy was always based on a green left fringe culture that was more mainstreamed and facilitated by left-wing media and other alliances of similar doctrine along the way. That isn’t a conspiracy but the reality of our time.
The protocol that there were larger apolitical social customs in many areas of society, such as science, has pretty much gone out the window thanks to the AGW movement in particular. It didn’t grow off the grass, it’s happening or has happened in may other industries and social enclaves. It’s not that college professors weren’t decidedly more left-wing in 1950 than the society at large for example. It’s simply that there was more political diversity on campus 60 years ago the range of what was considered “normal” has changed radically. So generally there is loss of confidence as each institution and social enclave declines to its core political inclinations. Science has merely joined the process, AGW advocacy was logical as it was linked to the larger enclave “Environmental Sciences” that grew in mass from the 60’s Earth Day culture. Why the media, the MSM variety, is decidedly left-wing and institutionalized and acting in concert is another topic. More seriously while people were divided 60 or 70 years ago they might have found a common ground in opposing fascism or communism as a basic prism of a whole society. Apolitical socialization was simply stronger than it is today. Now there are fantastical impositions of indoctrination at the lowest levels that would have been greatly feared just a generation ago. No conspiracy, just reality.

tb.. I’m saying you hit the bullseye on both accounts.
But you can bet they will keep trying anyway !!
If you go back to the raw data, by removing all the GISS, HadCrud “ADJUSTMENTS”…
there hasn’t been that very much warming in the last 70 or so years !
ps I’m sure they managed to ‘justify” all those ‘adjustments’, though ! lol !

by jove, i think the good Lord is on to something.
in london last nite, at the rain-affected Wimbeldon warmup at Queens, our former aussie #1, Lleyton Hewitt, had a go at the Tournament organisers for relying on weather forecasters:
16 June: NewsLtd: Marin Cilic beats Lleyton Hewitt in Queen’s club semi-final
A controversial decision to shift his semi-final with Marin Cilic from centre court after the match had started because of forecast bad weather angered Hewitt…
Hewitt claimed tournament officials were too reliant on too many weather forecasts.
“I just don’t think you can go off a forecast because, as they told me, they had 16 different forecasts going today from 16 different places, and they all had a different forecast,” Hewitt said…http://www.news.com.au/sport/tennis/marin-cilic-beats-lleyton-hewitt-in-queens-club-semi-final/story-fndkzym4-1226664495523

“Many skeptics can’t seem to publicly accept the basic truth, AGW is about a left-wing social agenda not based on a serious science discipline.”
As a point of fact, I suspect it’s likely that CAGW and the leftist social agenda both stem from a shared sensibility about how the world works. The one doesn’t adequately explain the other. Absent explicit declarations of political advocacy on the part of a scientist, limiting the discussion to the science is reasonable and proper.
It *is* frustrating, as a skeptic, to see how easily scientists have acquiesced to agenda-driven science, and it’s frustrating as a citizen to see policy guided by pseudoscience. Tearing down the Chinese wall, however, could foreseeably lead to greater frustrations down the road.

Kasuha says:
June 15, 2013 at 10:32 pm
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The data is the DATA. it never changes. It is only the interpretation of the data that changes.
The DATA is what the thermometers read at the time of the measurement as recorded in the contemporaneous log/record. That is the empirical observation, and is the underlying fact.
The issue here is whether any adjustment to the temperature as recorded (on any day) is required, and if so, clear reasons as to why this is the case, the extent of the adjustment necessary, and clear reasons why that extent is necessary/justified.
It is important to recognise that any adjustment is not a matter of fact but rather a matter of subjective interpretation. Hopefully, that subjective interpretation is carried out on an objective basis, but since the full explanation behind each and every adjustment is not readily available, it is difficult to judge the objectivity of the adjustments made.
The adjustments made, may of course, be reasonable and may assist in the objective interpretation of the data set. But likewise there is the risk that they do not assist the interpretation f the data set, but instead contaminate it.
One of the problems in climate science is that we run the risk that we are analysing the effects of the adjustments made to the data set, at the expense of properly analysing the data itself.

Margaret Hardman says:
“The rejection of AGW here is often ideological rather than scientific, as witnessed by cwon14′s unsubstantiated rant.”
Once again, Ms Hardman has the Scientific Method backward. The ‘rejection’ of AGW is based upon the fact that there is no measurable evidence supporting Margaret’s belief in AGW. Skeptics merely ask those pushing the AGW conjecture to provide testable measurements showing that AGW exists. But they have failed to provide any such measurements.
If I am wrong, Ms Hardman needs to post testable, verifiable measurements quantifying AGW. If she does, she will be the first to be able to do so. In fact, AGW is a wholly-invented fabrication with no basis in measurable, testable science. It is an unproven conjecture, nothing more.
And for the record, I agree with cwon14. Margaret also needs to post chapter and verse regarding her accusation of ‘a couple of misinterpreted emails’. There were plenty of emails that show the AGW scam for what it is, and her vague rebuttal does make that problem go away.

What is the collective noun for climate modellers?
A pomposity?
An ineptocracy?
An incompetency?
A duplicity?
In any event, this group of individuals who loudly trumpet alarmist ‘truths’ and their ‘proof’ of imminent Thermageddon must really adore those like Monckton, who routinely slice and dice their deeply flawed models.
“Show your work” – It would be nice if they did. Their great reluctance to do this is simply the result of not wishing to attract the attention of sceptics, like Monckton, and seeing their models subjected to well-deserved ridicule for their deliberate bias, cleverly manipulated data and flawed analysis.
Typical alarmists are incapable of discussing Monckton and his findings in anything other than the snottiest, or most derisory of terms. Why? Because they are deeply concerned about their ‘science’ being exposed for what it really is – a lot of misleading fuss about a non-problem, which deliberately ignores the effects of natural climate cycles and our variable star, the Sun.
Monckton helps keep ‘climate scientists’ honest, and they really do not like this, as this puts their career/job prospects in jeopardy – as they know that without a steady stream of scary BS, the funding will dry up.

Kasuha says:
June 15, 2013 at 10:32
In real science, we accept when results change in unfavorable way as long as we know they are closer to reality.
In real science we do no such thing. In real science we guess, calculate, measure reality and if REALITY DOESN’T FIT WITH THE CALCULATIONC THE GUESS WAS WRONG.
Richard FEYNMAN 1974.

Nick Stokes said “GHG forcing just goes on and on.”
Green house forcing seems to have stopped for the past 16 years or so, and in the latter half we find that temperatures are falling, could it be that temperatures have more to do with the the current half height solar high than they do with green house gases.
I look forward to hearing your views over the coming years if a prolonged period of cooling sets in as the combination of Penn, Livingston, Svalgaard and historic records suggest. I believe that Leif is on record on other posts on this blog as saying that loss of sunspots doesn’t mean that temperatures will drop, but documented history from the Dalton and Maunder periods would suggest otherwise.
Do you have a projection or a prediction for us Nick ? To 2030 say, longer if you are brave enough.

Margaret Hardman says:
June 15, 2013 at 11:24 pm
I find it interesting that, apart from a couple of misinterpreted emails, the evidence for conspiracy is non-existent yet it comes up time and time again.

The team conspired and strategized to get an editor fired. It discussed collectively boycotting journals too friendly to skeptics. A couple of them indicated they would keep a skeptic paper out of consideration in an upcoming AR even if they had to redefine what peer review meant. Those are the ones that pop into my head.

Lord Monckton observes: “I decided to look not only at HadCRUt4, as SteveF did, but also at the two satellite datasets, RSS and UAH. RSS showed warming at 0.7 Cº/century from 1979-1996 and cooling at almost 0.1 Cº/century from 1997-2012”
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Such a statement is erroneous; as a matter of first principle, one cannot extrapolate a data set over a period greater than that which it covers. RSS has only been going for just over 30 years, and therefore one cannot say what it provides on a centenial basis, but rather only on a decadel basis.
Let me give an example. I watch Ulsain Bolt run a 100 metre race, and I note that he runs this in about 9.5 seconds (my watch is only that accurate). 1 conclude that he is running at a speed of about 38km per hour. That statement over extrapolates the data that I have colected. I do not know whether he can run for as long as an hour (after all I have only seen him run for some 9.5 seconds and do not know whether he can keep it up), I do not know how far or at what speed he would run if he were to run for an hour. My data does not allow me to justificably make such assessments.
No doubt this would be proved if I were to place a bet on thee winner between Ulsain Bolt and Mo Farah over 10,000 metres. My projection from watching the 100 metres race suggests that Ulsain Bolt will run 10,000 metres in 15 mins 50 seconds, and I know from watching the 2012 Olympics that Mo Farah runs 10,000 mteres in about 27 mins 30 seconds. I conclude that this must make Ulsain Bolt the clear favourite. Can one imagine what would happen if I went into business as a bookmaker offering odds on a Mo Farah victory at say 1miiilion to one. After all Ulsain Bolt is nearly twice as fast and short of him tripping up and breaking a leg, it is difficult to see how he will not win by the proverbial ‘country mile’ since I expect hime to be several miles ahead of Mo Farah when he crosses the 10,000 metre finishing line. I would go bust because I am over extrapolating my data.
One can see the over extrapolation in the sentence that I have quoted. Lord Monckton observes that between 1979-1996 that RSS showed a warming at a rate of 0.7 ºC/century and then immediately notes that this can not safely be concluded as the centenial rate since over the next 15 years far from warming at that rate, it has actually cooled at a rate of 0.1 ºC/century.
The correct observation is that during the period 1979-1996 RSS shows a warming trend of 0.07 ºC/decade, whereas during the period 1997-2012, it shows a cooling trend of 0.01 ºC/decade.
This is not being pedantic. This is what the data shows. One must not over extrapolate beyond the bounds of the data set. False impressions result from such over extrapolations.

J Martin says: June 16, 2013 at 2:15 am
“Green house forcing seems to have stopped for the past 16 years or so, and in the latter half we find that temperatures are falling, could it be that temperatures have more to do with the the current half height solar high than they do with green house gases.”
I think you’ve missed what this post, and SteveF’s analysis are about. There are causes for variation – we know about them and can account for them, at least partly. And when you do, you get a better picture of forcing, and it hasn’t stopped.
Foster and Rahmstorf said it hadn’t reduced; SteveF has it down (maybe 1/3 of peak), but still continuing. Personally I doubt that the current weak solar cycle has much influence, but insofar as it does, it implies a higher forcing effect. They add together.

Kasuha says:
June 15, 2013 at 10:32 pm
I don’t consider myself a conspiration theorist, therefore I refuse to believe that there is conspiration to adjust past temperature records in a way favorable to global warming alarmism.
Of course if somebody found that they intentionally changed data processing towards less precise but politically more favorable, that would be a different story. But I’m not aware of any evidence for that.
Kasuha, I think you should study the difference between the US GISS data set (Hansens) before and after 1999. It’s quite clear the data has been changed.
1999 US temps – http://www.giss.nasa.gov/research/briefs/hansen_07/
That graph came from here http://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/abs/ha03200f.html
Now go here: http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/cag/
and plug in US 1985-1999 and compare. Using the 1999 data, and adding the measured change from 1999-2013, which is “no change”., the US temps this past decade are less than they were during the 1930’s. There has been no warming in the US this past century. This is not a conspiracy theory, this is the facts as they stand.
George Orwell – “He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past.”

Thermodynamically speaking taking a temperature reading when a body is not at thermodynamic equilibrium leads to the incorrect answer. So, in theory at least, all temperatures taken whether inside, or outside, a Stevenson screen are wrong since the planet is never at equilibrium.

tokyoboy says:
June 16, 2013 at 12:04 am
///////////////////////////////////////////////////////
UHI is an obvious problem in the land based thermometer data sets. The satellite data sets do not suffer from the same problem.
One possible conclussion from a comparison of the two satellite data sets with the land based thermometer data sets for the 1980s to late 1990s warming is that in reality there was very little real warming, and the warming set out in the land based thermometer data sets is little more than an artefact caused predominantly by UHI.
A detailed study nneds to be performed on all adjacent temperature measuring sites which exhibit the kind of discrepancy that you have noted between Tokyo and Miyake Island. Are there any geographical issues that may explain the difference? What is the precise siting of the stations? Is there any difference in equipment, calibration? how has population density changed etc?
Like many others who read this blog, I am far from convinced that we have a proper handle on UHI and the extent to which the data sets may have become contaminated by this (and I include station drop outs). I know that Anthony is working hard on this. It is not a straight forward exercise.

if you don’t show the arguments to support a revision in a historic temperature record as has happened between HadCRUt3 and t4, not just there but also in other jurisdictions, the adjusted record simply does not exist as a scientific document. anybody can write a list of numbers, for them to have value and veracity they need the source and interpretation and the adjustments to be explicit.
and then they may be accepted, may.
all parties should argue for a first principles approach, the original data. Without a verified record of how it was arrived at, then its of the table.

Margaret Hardman says:
June 15, 2013 at 11:24 pm
… Bias watch: lifelong Conservative voter, Daily Telegraph reader.
In that case, can you explain to me how global warming scepticism can be squared with being against policies whose outcomes (rather than intentions) make the rich richer and the poor poorer?

Well, thanks. Harrabin’s question about the three times the temperature has risen at the same rate was a key insight for me. I wonder how many times I wrote that the correlation of temperature rise with CO2 rise is best ‘only in the last quarter of the last century’. Steve, bless his heart, must doubt Julio’s attribution after all.
===========

Margaret Hardman. At least you are given the opportunity to express your views on this website, which is more we “deniers” are allowed to do on websites that support AGW.
Yes I read the Telegraph, yes I usually vote Conservative, because it is self evident that every time, without exception that Labour has been in power the country’s economy has gone down the toilet. With the propoganda of AGW it will go down the toilet big time. We simply cannot afford it!
You mention misinterpreted e-mails. There is no misinterpretation, these con men want their grant money to continue rolling in, which it won’t if AGW isn’t happening. The government wants AGW to be happening so they can tax us with justification and build more useless windmills, that they can pretend is one of their measures to save the world. In fact it has nothing to do with our government, it is an edict from the EU, the left wing, unelected, corrupt (accounts not been signed off by the auditors for 19 years) body that now makes our laws.
Even the “experts” cannot fudge the evidence any longer, there has been no warming for 17 years and four months. AGW is the most expensive con trick ever to be perpertated on mankind.

Has anyone here listened to Rebecca Costa or read her 2010 book The Watchman’s Rattle: Thinking Our Way Out Of Extinction? She is using climate skepticism and how widespread it has become as a Number 1 Example of the kind of irrational beliefs that doomed the Mayan civilization. That we are on the road to doom because of our ability to think analytically and that we need to shift to thinking creatively so that we can find solutions to complex problems like AGW that the governments can then impose.
We are getting education reforms globally to train students to substitute unsupported beliefs for facts and then we can now measure via functional MRI whether the brain is in fact learning to think ideologically, instead of logically problem solving. Researchers have even figured out what part of the brain “lights up like a Christmas tree” when the brain has shifted away from “normal left and right-brain problem solving.” It’s the anterior Superior Temporal Gyrus (aSTG).
When you have a massive organized international effort to identify, encourage, and monitor whether students are learning to move away from rational, fact-based thought so that we can get beyond the debates over Climate Change and simply reorganize society as desired, we need to make note of that. We are properly arguing about the facts and whether the models fit them while education reforms are insisting that only the models will matter in the future. That people need to learn to defer to supercomputer modelling and the advice of experts.
It seems like while we are arguing the real story is that neuroscience is being used to make sure the next generation believes this to the level of physiological change within the brain. And once created, it may take repeated episodes of horrendous cooling to jar the created Mindsets back open.

Nick StokesFoster and Rahmstorf said it hadn’t reduced; SteveF has it down (maybe 1/3 of peak), but still continuing. Personally I doubt that the current weak solar cycle has much influence, but insofar as it does, it implies a higher forcing effect. They add together.
Actually it implies a weaker forcing – if natural forcings partly explain 20th century warming, there isn’t a lot of room for alarm.
The IPCC 3c / doubling estimate is based on the assumption that other forcings don’t contribute significantly to climate change. If this assumption is wrong – if say even half the 20th century warming was caused by natural forcings, such as the highest level of solar activity for 8000 years ( http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/paleo/pubs/solanki2004/solanki2004.html ), then the real climate sensitivity to CO2 is a very unalarming 1.5c / doubling.
At 1.5c / doubling or less, there is simply no point attempting to reduce emissions. The benefits of CO2, such as CO2 fertilisation of global food production, far outweigh any negative effects.

“The rejection of AGW here is often ideological rather than scientific,”
On the contrary, you have it totally arse about !!
AGW is about ideology and agenda.
Scepticism IS science !!
You cannot be a scientist without being sceptical..
if you are not sceptical… you are not a scientist.
Science is built around RATIONAL argument……
.. AGW….. Not so much………………………. its a belief system. !!

I have yet to find any evidence in the paleoclimatic record that CO2 has any effect on climate. From the modeling point of view, there are ample negative feedbacks in the atmosphere attributable to H2O so as to zero out the effects of added CO2.

Nick Stokes said:
“I think you’ve missed what this post, and SteveF’s analysis are about. There are causes for variation – we know about them and can account for them, at least partly. And when you do, you get a better picture of forcing, and it hasn’t stopped.
Foster and Rahmstorf said it hadn’t reduced; SteveF has it down (maybe 1/3 of peak), but still continuing. Personally I doubt that the current weak solar cycle has much influence, but insofar as it does, it implies a higher forcing effect. They add together.”
To quote Overpeck, man’s contribution has swamped all natural variability for the last 50 years and they checked everything – including the sun – and it’s impossible that any natural forces were drivers of the warming.
So yes, the greenhouse forcing “went away”.

Out of interest, given that the CIA has been accused of every major outrage since 1945 (including transmission of African Swine Fever into Humans to create HIV in Haiti and the Dominican Republic) through release of strains generated on Plum Island and the encouragement of populations in Brazil to eat ASF-infected pork to generate AIDS down there), what is the CIA conspiracy theory about how they created ‘global warming’?
LOL

Here, Nick. From Jonathan’s youtube video
Jonathan Overpeck said:
“:…but we’ve looked at a lot of those issues, I think all of them. Some of them raised like “this is just part of the natural cycle” or “it’s caused by the sun becoming warmer” – these are things the scientific community started looking at decades ago and really got our arms around about 10 years ago for most of them and we’ve been able to discount them as possible drivers…”

@Nick Stokes
“I don’t see the logic of that. In fact if the cooling since 2001 can be explained by the PDO, then removing its effect would enhance the role of GHG forcing.”
Removing its effect would also lower the pre-2001 temperatures and you know that very well.
You surprise me but not in a good way.
Eric, you are on the right path.

Such a statement [rate in C°/century] is erroneous; as a matter of first principle, one cannot extrapolate a data set over a period greater than that which it covers. RSS has only been going for just over 30 years, and therefore one cannot say what it provides on a centenial basis, but rather only on a decadel basis.

Curious. I shall have to pay more attention to the speedometer in my car, I had been under the impression that it displayed the instantaneous speed. I wonder if I set the cruise control it will change the display from miles per second (x3600) to miles per minute (x60) to miles per hour which is what I thought it displayed.
In high school, physics was my favorite course. I distinctly recall equations for the vertical velocity of objects in a trajactory (assuming flat Earth and no atmosphere) had a 32t term and used units of feet per second. This produced very nice upside down parabolas in velocity vs. time graphs. (I’ve always liked parabolas.) Now I hear the graphs should have been in one second steps. Those won’t be nearly as pretty, the best I could do is look at trajectorys up to 59 seconds, after that I’d have to use feet per minute. Bummer.

See E.M Smith“Suppose there were a simple way to view a historical change of the data that is of the same scale as the reputed “Global Warming” but was clearly caused simply by changes of processing of that data.
Suppose this were demonstrable for the GHCN data on which all of NCDC, GISS with GIStemp, and Hadley CRU with HadCRUT depend? Suppose the nature of the change were such that it is highly likely to escape complete removal in the kinds of processing done by those temperature series processing programs? Would it be too much to ask that folks take just a bit longer to think about what they plan to do to the economy in the face of that kind of foundation of sand to the Global Average Temperature?
It is my opinion that the situation is exactly that way. And relatively easily demonstrated. “http://chiefio.wordpress.com/2012/06/20/summary-report-on-v1-vs-v3-ghcn/
And E.M. does show his work – now show yours.

richard verney says:
June 16, 2013 at 2:26 am
Lord Monckton observes: “I decided to look not only at HadCRUt4, as SteveF did, but also at the two satellite datasets, RSS and UAH. RSS showed warming at 0.7 Cº/century from 1979-1996 and cooling at almost 0.1 Cº/century from 1997-2012″
///////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
Such a statement is erroneous; as a matter of first principle, one cannot extrapolate a data set over a period greater than that which it covers. RSS has only been going for just over 30 years, and therefore one cannot say what it provides on a centenial basis, but rather only on a decadel basis.
Let me give an example. I watch Ulsain Bolt run a 100 metre race, and I note that he runs this in about 9.5 seconds (my watch is only that accurate). 1 conclude that he is running at a speed of about 38km per hour. That statement over extrapolates the data that I have colected. I do not know whether he can run for as long as an hour (after all I have only seen him run for some 9.5 seconds and do not know whether he can keep it up), I do not know how far or at what speed he would run if he were to run for an hour. My data does not allow me to justificably make such assessments.
You are conflating two different things.
1. The current rate (or rate of change)
2. The possibility that the current rate (or rate of change) will be maintained.

Then there are exogenous revisions, like surprise discoveries of a whole biosphere that uses carbon in a surprise manner and has not been incorporated in any climate model, like this one:
Life found thriving deep under ocean floor
By Douglas Main
Beneath the seafloor lives a vast and diverse array of microbes, chomping on carbon that constantly rains down from above and is continually buried by a never-ending downpour of debris — some whale dung here, some dead plankton there.
For the first time, a study has shown that these microbes are actively multiplying and likely even moving around in the compressed, oxygen-devoid darkness beneath the abyss.
The finding, detailed in the June 12 issue of the journal Nature, is important because the sediments below the seafloor harbor most of the Earth’s organic carbon, as well a majority of its microorganisms, according to various scientific estimates. These microbes also play a vital but little-understood role in the cycle of carbon between the ocean and the seafloor, which impacts the entire Earth’s climate.
The study is the first to directly show these microbes are alive and kicking, said study team member William Orsi…http://www.foxnews.com/science/2013/06/13/thriving-microbe-community-lives-beneath-seafloor/

Ian W says: June 16, 2013 at 5:12 am
“And E.M. does show his work – now show yours.”
Well, I’ll show mine. Here is a post by Zeke at Lucia’s comparing the major indices with calculations done independently by him and me, among others. We used unadjusted GHCN and HADSST2. Unadjusted is what it’s name suggests – historic records are basically as they were released on CD in the 1990’s, and more recently are exactly as reported by the Met Offices on CLIMAT forms. And they match very well.
You can read more about my own version here.

Crispin in Waterloo says: June 16, 2013 at 4:36 am
“I don’t see the logic of that. In fact if the cooling since 2001 can be explained by the PDO, then removing its effect would enhance the role of GHG forcing.”
Removing its effect would also lower the pre-2001 temperatures and you know that very well.
Indeed it would. The proposition is that the PDO caused warming to 2001, then cooling. If you remove that effect you get less warming pre 2001 and more since, hence a more even trend.

Margaret Hardman says at June 15, 2013 at 11:24 pm…
Well, I’m a Labour party supporter. I read the Guardian. I used to post on the Guardian website until I was banned for linking to the MET office website and the temperature graphs that don’t support catastrophism.
Believing in theory over empirical evidence is not a left-wing / right-wing split. Look at Maggie Thatcher and her economic policies. It’s taken a quarter century to start rebuilding our manufacturing base (cars mainly).
In the case of AGW the empirical evidence says that we do not know if it is significant but we can tell already that it is not catastrophic in any plannable timescale. But some people believe the theory over the evidence. That is not a position that we on the left should adopt. It is wrong philosophically but it very wrong politically.
Why bet your whole economic plan on a weather forecast?

@ Margaret Hardman. Do you still pay money for or read the Guardian ? I read on another post that sales were down 12.5% last year.
As beneficial co2 increases, catastrophic Guardian sales decrease. Long may that relationship continue.

Monckton says:“SteveF’s conclusion is that once allowance has been made for three naturally-occurring influences – volcanic aerosols, the ~11-year solar cycle and the el Niño/la Niña cycles – the HadCRUt4 warming rate from 1979-1996 was six times faster than from 1997-2012. In the abstract, to allow for uncertainties, he cautiously reduces this to three times faster.”
SteveF’s analysis is based on a deeply flawed premise that renders his entire ‘finding’ a mere statistical artifact and thus irrelevant to what actually happens in the real world.
The flawed premise is this: SSTa in the NINO3.4 region of the equatorial central/eastern Pacific Ocean captures all climatic effects induced by the ENSO process and can thus be used to fully represent the phenomenon. This is a laughable proposition. NINO3.4 is not ENSO.
As long as SteveF (or anyone else for that matter) keeps thinking he can remove the NINO3.4 signal from the global and thereby having removed the ENSO signal to end up with a leftover ‘radiative forcing signal’, he is deluding himself, simply inventing causes that aren’t there. The ‘radiative forcing signal’ does not exist. Only as a presupposed theoretical one. In reality, the global warming is caused by ENSO-processes that work outside the NINO3.4 region.
Also, including volcanic aerosols to obtain a climatic signal is ridiculous. Volcanic aerosols have no longterm climatic impact. They have an effect as long as they stay suspended, a couple of years. After that it’s all back to normal, no hint of their former existence.
Finally, there is no point including the 11 year solar cycle as a separate forcing factor. It is already baked into the ENSO signal.

Kasuha says:
June 15, 2013 at 10:32 pm
I don’t consider myself a conspiration theorist, therefore I refuse to believe that there is conspiration to adjust past temperature records in a way favorable to global warming alarmism.
………………………….But I’m not aware of any evidence for that.

There does not need to be a conspiracy. All those people from Mann and Hansen to Jones know what is required. Hansen is famous for adjusting past temps. Here are a few quotes to look at and then maybe take a look at there actions throughout this scandal and ask yourself “would such people carry out temperature revision favourable to the cause”??? I can’t answer the question for you – each person can draw their own conclusions.

Dr. Phil Jones – CRU emails – 5th July, 2005
“The scientific community would come down on me in no uncertain terms if I said the world had cooled from 1998. OK it has but it is only 7 years of data and it isn’t statistically significant….”
Dr. Phil Jones – CRU emails – 7th May, 2009
‘Bottom line: the ‘no upward trend’ has to continue for a total of 15 years before we get worried.’
Dr. Phil Jones – CRU emails – 29 May, 2008
Can you delete any emails you may have had with Keith re AR4?
Keith will do likewise. He’s not in at the moment – minor family crisis.
Can you also email Gene and get him to do the same? I don’t
have his new email address.
We will be getting Caspar to do likewise.
Dr. Phil Jones – CRU emails – July 8, 2004
“…I can’t see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report. Kevin [Trenberth] and I will keep them out somehow, even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!”
Dr. Kevin Trenberth – CRU emails – 12 Oct. 2009
“Well, I have my own article on where the heck is global warming…..The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t.”http://www.masterresource.org/2013/06/revisting-climategate-climatism-falters/

@ Nick Stokes. I did not look very closely at the post the first time round and I will reread it and look more closely at the second time. But you ducked my question about making a guess about temperatures in some reasonable distance into the future. I’m sure Feynman would say that taking a guess is OK based on what ever model appeals to you most. Pick your own date 2020 ? 2030 ?
I like someone else’s model that suggests that one possibility is that temperatures are going to decline over the next 30 years to just above the Dalton, where they will stay for another 30 years and then decline to 2130 by which time it will be well below the Maunder.
Of course it will be wrong at some point (it’s a model) but when and by how much and in what direction remains to be seen. Maybe it will be wrong almost straight away and temperatures will increase once more, I certainly hope we get some decent warm, even hot summers soon.
Take a guess or at least give a reason why not.

Nick Stokes says:
June 15, 2013 at 10:46 pm
GHG forcing just goes on and on.
========
while temperatures have not kept pace. which strongly suggests GHG is not forcing temperatures. which strongly suggests that the theory is wrong.
the entire basis of the assumption of positive feedback has been shown to be wrong. atmospheric moisture levels have not been increasing with temperatures.
the “tropospheric hotspot”, a fundamental prediction of AGW and confirmed in all the climate models does not exist. this single fact is sufficient to falsify AGW.
Image Einstein’s prediction for General Relativity had failed during the eclipse of 1919. Relativity would have been throw out on its ear.
The fact that AGW has not been thrown out, in spite of failure of two of its predictions. Namely increasing temperatures with increasing CO2, and the hotspot, demonstrates conclusively that we are not dealing with a scientific theory.
AGW is a pseudo science. A belief system. Belief does not respond to evidence, because it is conformational in nature. those observations that strengthen the belief are conformation that the belief is correct. those observations that contradict the belief are held by the belief system to be temporary. if one wait long enough they will be contradicted.
Thus warming from 1980-2000 is believed to be permanent, while lack of warming from 2000-present is believed to be temporary, that eventually warming will return.
Yet both the warming from 1980-2000 and the lack of warming from 2000-present are history, and thus are permanent, except of course if they are later revised by changes to the temperature records.

Christopher Monckton writes: “SteveF’s essay takes no account of the most substantial medium-term natural cycle that seems to influence global temperatures: the Pacific Decadal Oscillation. The cycles of that great Oscillation tend to exercise a warming influence for about 30 years followed by a cooling influence for about 30 years.” And you mentioned the PDO a number of times afterwards.
If you’re referring to the Pacific Decadal Oscillation as the multidecadal variations of ENSO and the resulting multidecadal variations in the sea surface temperatures of the Pacific Ocean as a whole, then I will be more than happy to agree with you. But I would request that in the future you use the terms Pacific Decadal Variability or Pacific Multidecadal Variability to express that to avoid confusion with the PDO as represented by the JISAO PDO index.
If you’re referring to the Pacific Decadal Oscillation as represented by the JISAO PDO index, then I can’t agree with you. The PDO is a statistically determined index derived from of the spatial patterns of the sea surface temperature anomalies of the North Pacific north of 20N. It is as abstract representation of the sea surface temperature of the North Pacific. When you think of the PDO index, think Picasso. The PDO does not represent the sea surface temperature of the North Pacific, where it’s derived. It does not represent the sea surface temperatures of the Pacific as a whole. In other words, it doesn’t represent sea surface temperature. The PDO is, in fact, inversely related to the sea surface temperatures of the North Pacific, north of 20N. The sea surface temperatures of the North Pacific are dominated by the sea surface temperatures of the mid-latitudes east of Japan, an area known as the Kuroshio-Oyashio Extension (KOE). The sea surface temperatures of the KOE are inversely related to the PDO.
For those new to the PDO, see the posts here:http://bobtisdale.wordpress.com/2011/06/30/yet-even-more-discussions-about-the-pacific-decadal-oscillation-pdo/
And here:http://bobtisdale.wordpress.com/2010/09/14/an-inverse-relationship-between-the-pdo-and-north-pacific-sst-anomaly-residuals/
And here:http://bobtisdale.wordpress.com/2010/09/03/an-introduction-to-enso-amo-and-pdo-part-3/

James Allison says:
June 16, 2013 at 2:24 am
Steven Mosher says:
June 15, 2013 at 10:40 pm
show your work
===============
Presumably directed at the Had Crew.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
You may be right, but I would never presume to try to interpupt one of his crypto-hit-and-run comments.

If we wouldn’t calculate the alleged average “warming” or “cooling” of the Globe’s atmosphere during the past 100 years in degrees Celsius or Farenheit, but in degrees Kelvin, ANY of te alledged vaiations in warming and cooling would instantly become indiscernible from a straight, flat line.

Jimbo says:
June 16, 2013 at 6:33 am
================================
Kasuha says:
June 15, 2013 at 10:32 pm
I don’t consider myself a conspiration theorist, therefore I refuse to believe that there is conspiration to adjust past temperature records in a way favorable to global warming alarmism.
………………………….But I’m not aware of any evidence for that.
==========================
visual aid:http://stevengoddard.wordpress.com/data-tampering-at-ushcngiss/

Dear Sir Monckton, regarding revisionism there is something much more devastating than downward and upward corrections. Temperature time series should be longitudinal. Repeated measurements are needed with the same instruments on the same places. Take as an example a study into reading ability of children. In the course of time repeated assessments are needed for the same children. Suppose, the researcher sends each year a number of children home and invites some new children into his class room. This goes on year after year. We need a good bookkeeping of drop-out and inclusion, not just the total number. Suppose next that drop-out and inclusion are far from random: the researcher selects the children for drop-out and inclusion. Suppose also that after a number of years group size is reduced by eighty percent and that the group of children is almost completely changed. Suppose finally that the researcher reports an enormous increment of reading ability. He assures that we should trust him because he has all kind of trick to make the data pseudo-longitudinal. No relevant journal would publish his results. Make a bookkeeping account of surface stations from year to year since 1970, containing both drop-out and inclusion numbers. If drop-out and inclusion were random, how can it be that time series of drop-outs correlate lower with their regional time series than non-drop-outs? I have found 20 sigma differences, so significance does not matter any more. The great dying of the thermometers was not just a random reduction of surface station number but an almost complete non-random change. The surface station record seems to be hopelessly compromised.

“I think Nicks paid job yes paid I say is to go to sites like these and fight for AGW. The more I see his comments the more I am convinced of this.”
Wow, then his employers sure aren’t getting very much for their money, are they?

Lord Monckton is more sober or prudent than many of the commenters here. He says:
“Disentangling the true contribution of CO2 to warming from not only the numerous natural influences but also from the effects of data revisionism is near impossible. We shall have to wait and see. The one fact that is already clear, however, is that the warming rate predicted by the models on whose output the climate scare is founded is proving to be a hefty exaggeration.”
It’s fairly clear that there has been no warming on a scale that our decision-makers need to be concerned about, and that CO2 may or may not have made a significant contribution to the warming, when it has occurred. A great deal remains to be discovered.

I would like to ask the community a favor. Regarding temperature, it has often been noted that Maximum Temps have not warmed, but that Minimum Temps have, thus the Average Temp rises due to lower limit rising. I’ve never seen a graph with these data!
Do any of you have any reference that shows a graph dating back to 1880, that shows Maximum Temperature, and MInimum Temperature graphed separately, or even better, on the same graph??
If such an animal exists … I would like to ask Anthony to add it to his temperature reference page.

Nick Stokes says:
June 15, 2013 at 10:46 pm
GHG forcing just goes on and on
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Well sure. Of course one must ignore that the effect is logarithmic, that the cooling response is exponential, and assume that a limit approaching zero is significant even when we can’t measure the difference between it and zero, to come to that conclusion. So much bad physics in a single sentence.

Nick Stokes says:
June 16, 2013 at 2:44 am
There are causes for variation – we know about them and can account for them, at least partly.
=============
the “accounting” is spurious. the result of applying linear regression to non-stationary data. a failure to allow for autocorrelation.
look at the temperature data. the mark 1 eyeball can see autocorrelation with a period of roughly 60 years. you can’t do linear regression until after you difference the data to remove the autocorrelation. when you do, you find that you must difference the data 1 time for solar influences, and 2 times for CO2 influences. which leads to the inescapable conclusion that CO2 is a transitory forcing. while solar forcings do accumulate, the climate system adjusts to eliminate the effects of increasing or decreasing CO2 over time. GHG has negative feedback, something not considered in any of the climate models.

“davidmhoffer says:
June 16, 2013 at 7:40 am
Nick Stokes says:
June 15, 2013 at 10:46 pm
GHG forcing just goes on and on
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Well sure. Of course one must ignore that the effect is logarithmic, that the cooling response is exponential, and assume that a limit approaching zero is significant even when we can’t measure the difference between it and zero, to come to that conclusion. So much bad physics in a single sentence.”
Indeed! Ditto…

wws says:
June 16, 2013 at 7:26 am
“I think Nicks paid job yes paid I say is to go to sites like these and fight for AGW. The more I see his comments the more I am convinced of this.”
Wow, then his employers sure aren’t getting very much for their money, are they?

Ah. A commenter nails it about the lack of variable control were they applied to educational studies. The result? Validity and reliability are destroyed. The entire temperature data set is based on the worst case of lack of subject control known in published research. Seed plots would be likewise useless were such plots subjected to the same degree of selective exclusion from trials.

Re: excluding natural drivers of land temperatures. Not all forms of natural variation drivers were excluded. Oceans collect heat from the Sun especially around the equatorial belt. But only if clouds allow that to happen. And because of the depth of that warming, oceans hold onto that heat (we are talking direct shorter wave heat penetration, not insigificant surface LW re-radiation penetration). To have properly excluded the SW source of heat, these climate wannabe researchers should have studied how oceans overturn that heat, move it around, release it here and there and hold onto to it here and there, all the while getting psuedo-randomly recharged with more or less heat. That natural “heating and cooling” noise may eventually cancel itself out but only have a very long period of time. The rush to judgment is written all over the AGW articles we have panned here.

I once tried my hand at Fourier to extract the periodic component that shows up in HadCRUT3.
My results: Period of 64 years with peaks in 1877, 1941, and 2005. Amplitude of .207 degree C peak-to-peak, assuming the periodic component is a sinusoid. This was the cosine component for 2 periods from 1877 to 2005.
As for increasing rate of the linear trend: I looked at smoothed HadCRUT3 and found the rise from 1909-1941 was .493 C and the rise from 1973 to 2005 was .523 C. However, I should follow this up with linear trend figures for those 2 periods. That is because the 1909-1941 period has a spikier dip at its beginning and a spikier peak at its end than 1973-2005. I am expecting the linear trend to be close to .41 C/32 years for 1909-1941 and .52 C/32 years for 1973-2005
(eyeball estimates at this moment), indicating a warming rate increase around .0034 degree/decade.
Something else notable is that the periodic component was stronger in the 1877-1941 period than in the 1941-2005 period. This means that the warming rate increased by more than
~.0034 degree/decade.

I wonder if we will ever have a decent global temperature history. It would be interesting if someone could extend the GHCN v1 data set to the present. Revive all those dead thermometers and see what they would say.
I think the bottom line is the amount of warming would decease substantially. In addition, if the proper UHI adjustments were put in place (hopefully the new Watts et all will help in this regard), what warming was left over might completely disappear (a least statistically).
I believe the data is available, it would just take an unbiased study to document it.
Speaking of bias, it is well know in the medical research field that bias is important. There have been literally hundreds of papers written on the subject. How many papers have been written on possible bias in climate research? I’ve heard of none. While some like to believe in conspiracies I think it gets down to one simple fact. The researchers all “believed” we should be warming and as they made changes to the temperature history that belief affected their work. In fact, if you read about medical research that statement is almost guaranteed to be true. It is simple human nature.

I think ending the PDO warm mode in 2001 is wrong. Yes, one could pick almost any date between 1998 and 2006 but I think 2005 is the best date. If you eyeball the slope it crosses the zero line around 2005. Remember that ENSO events impact the PDO index.
Is the reason for ending it in 2001 is to show a longer period of cooling? Don’t know, but it also does 2 other things. It increases the warming rate prior to the switch and it decreases the cooling rate after the switch. Since Moncton computed both those numbers I believe those numbers are questionable.
Also keep in mind that historic measurements of the PDO have much larger errors.

Margaret Hardman says:
June 15, 2013 at 11:24 pm
You have little or no quantitative evidence to support AGW, it’s an inductive argument at best but clearly motivated by politics. The conspiracy label is a ad hominem approach. I’ve addressed the tactic up the thread.
Try reading Delingpole for a time.

u.k.(us) says:
June 16, 2013 at 8:50 am
Peter Miller says:
June 16, 2013 at 1:49 am
============
Very nice comment.
This caught my attention:
“……..which deliberately ignores the effects of natural climate cycles and our variable star, the Sun.”
———–
What causes the variations anyway ?, must be something ?
The bottom line is, of course, the amount of solar radiation absorbed by our planets various systems (atmosphere, oceans, land, biosphere, etc.). I think most of the current small variations in what we call “climate” are generally due to how that energy is released into the atmosphere. These ocean cycles lead to variable insertions of solar energy into the atmosphere. In and of themselves they do not add or subtract from the longer term energy budget. That is controlled by albedo and incoming solar energy. The rest of it just keeps us busy.

M Courtney says:
June 16, 2013 at 6:08 am
The skeptic community is clearly more politically diverse than the core AGW leadership and MSM arms. Then again that creates a problem of political candor inside such a diverse community. The technician skeptic community clearly downplay political motivations under the “it’s about science” meme. A land of Purple Unicorns and good intentions of all. They also don’t want to be easy smearing targets for a much larger propaganda force at the disposal of AGW advocates. Trying to be a harder target by being politically ambivalent. Practical dishonesty under totalitarian political correctness pressures.
Such orthodox customs can’t accept the truth of the AGW culture war. Skeptic denial (or conscious minimization) of the political MO of the broad AGW movement or hanging around the margin or “above” politics deserve rebuke. The debate would end faster if all acknowledged the political truth which privately many do and understand in many forms but remain silent for numerous reasons. The gap between public and private acknowledgement in AGW politics is very high.

DrJohnGalan says:
June 16, 2013 at 3:18 am
Margaret Hardman says:
June 15, 2013 at 11:24 pm
… Bias watch: lifelong Conservative voter, Daily Telegraph reader.
In that case, can you explain to me how global warming scepticism can be squared with being against policies whose outcomes (rather than intentions) make the rich richer and the poor poorer?
//////////
The same can be said of the cousin of AGW doctrine, Global Keynesian monetary policy. You can scarcely find a leftist who isn’t condemning “the rich” who isn’t supporting a leveraged fiat money system that only the wealthy can survive in. Ironic isn’t it?

dbstealey says:
June 16, 2013 at 1:41 am
Thanks, I seldom dwell on the Climategate emails. Margaret is making an erroneous comment, there are none on this thread. Climategate confirmed my long held views but are of little importance.
I witnessed the climate/anti-industry/green movement first hand in the 70’s. I was a member of the Sierra Club and active on of all things water pollution issues in my youth. I can never say my politics were narrowly liberal but I watched as authoritarianism and statism converged on the AGW movement.

Conspiracy? Did somebody say “The Club Of Rome”?http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Club_of_Rome
“In searching for a common enemy against whom we can unite, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like, would fit the bill. In their totality and their interactions these phenomena do constitute a common threat which must be confronted by everyone together. But in designating these dangers as the enemy, we fall into the trap, which we have already warned readers about, namely mistaking symptoms for causes. All these dangers are caused by human intervention in natural processes, and it is only through changed attitudes and behaviour that they can be overcome. The real enemy then is humanity itself.”

Txomin says:
June 15, 2013 at 11:43 pm
In the U.S there is a writer and journalist Bernie Goldberg http://www.bernardgoldberg.com/bias/
If you take the time he will well define the difference between bias and conspiracy. The key misnomer is thinking bias is less cumulatively damaging and socially acceptable than an act of conspiracy. Both are often tied by the hip but bias of the social majority is the primary distortion of AGW belief systems. Conspiracy propagates with popular approval of the underlying group support but it dwarfed by group bias as the main drive of AGW belief systems. Same in Hollywood, MSM, unions, government workers or college campus life. You can find some dissent but it’s a consensus authority system at work in all of these groupings. Climate Science has just been normalized in this regard.

Eeyore Rifkin says:
June 16, 2013 at 12:40 am
The frustration is going to come one way or another. AGW is a symptom of social decline not the cause. Skeptics are maintaining the Marquess and Queensberry rules while AGW advocates have taken the lessons of Orwell as a “how-to” guide. Science is no longer clean of political bias and we shouldn’t punish the messengers for admitting as much.

Richard M says at 8:17 am
“Revive all those dead thermometers and see what they would say. I think the bottom line is the amount of warming would decrease substantially”:
If I had the means, I would do it, i.e begin with the 9644 stations on 1 January 1970, revive the 9434 (in as far as not added in between) stations that died during the next thirty years and Ignore the 2918 stations that were added. Perhaps Michael Mann could give me a small subsidy because it would solve his divergence problem.

Dr. Deanster says
“I would like to ask the community a favor. Regarding temperature, it has often been noted that Maximum Temps have not warmed, but that Minimum Temps have, thus the Average Temp rises due to lower limit rising. I’ve never seen a graph with these data!
Do any of you have any reference that shows a graph dating back to 1880, that shows Maximum Temperature, and MInimum Temperature graphed separately, or even better, on the same graph??
If such an animal exists … I would like to ask Anthony to add it to his temperature reference page.”
I always watched the two slopes, and the long term average upper and lower, on the daily weather forecasts by Weather Network.
A couple of weeks ago they stopped that.
Now, you can’t see that anomaly was usually and mostly night-time.

Robin says:
June 16, 2013 at 3:30 am
Many years ago, I accompanied an eminent philosopher of science to a lecture by Sir John Eccles who had won a Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. In the first minute of the lecture, Sir John stated that he had found the seat of free will in the brain. The eminent philosopher of science immediately walked out.

Thanks Theo. This guys are not kidding. This getting around the rational gatekeeper part of the mind gets hidden as higher order thinking skills and deep learning and creativity. Just saw an honest teacher development presentation that said in order to get deep learning you also have to address social and emotional competencies. But teachers are too afraid of their jobs now to walk out.
Jeremy–speaking of the Club of Rome and SEL generally have you ever seen the 2006 Turning Points document of theirs that talks about relying on instincts and emotion instead of reason. An SEL emphasis as CoR said openly makes it easier to “Steer human and economic behaviors.” http://www.invisibleserfscollar.com/using-systems-thinking-to-retie-the-psychological-umbilical-cord-to-our-environment/ explains that.
That document was also one of the first places I encountered this now prevalent view that ICT merits a different kind of economic structure and consciousness. That’s also the real reason for the AGW hype beyond money but necessary to save the globe sounds better and prompts action.
Honesty about rent seeking, no so much.

Thisisnotgoodtogo.
Thanks for acknowledging that I posted something. 🙂
As a person who spends a lot of time on other sites making the case for Real Science, I like to be armed with the facts. Anyone else like me knows that the first knee jerk argument that will be put up by Alarmists is the graph showing that temps have warmed since 1880. Even when looking just at the Satelite era … they will still put how it has warmed since 1979.
I’m convinced after reading this stuff and researching it for 15 years, that the earths temperature is governed by the natural processes that influence the amount of radiant energy that reaches the surface. The sun itself probably doesnt’ vary too much, but it’s magnetics, and other processes influence cloud cover, etc. Clouds are HUGE. The Volcanoe experiemnts clearly show that increaseing arosols decreases temperature. The YD event, is hypothesized to have occurred because of an “impact event” which most certainly would have put tonnes of dust and particles in the atmosphere, thus decreasing the amount of radiant enery reaching the surface. Then there is the recent report from spain, and other places, noting that the decrease in pollution is resulting in an increase radiant energy reaching the surface. About the only place I see a place for CO2 is in nighttime temps.
So as I said, just because the overall average has gone up, doesn’t mean that it is any hotter today than it was 100 years ago … because the average is made up of the Maximum and the Minimum.
So again, I’ll make a call to the more engaged people here … are there any graphs of Maximum Temperature and Minimum Temperature dating back to 1880?? …. 1979??
Christompher Mockton … ?? Surely you know where to get this data. Anthody??

J Martin says: June 16, 2013 at 6:35 am
“But you ducked my question about making a guess about temperatures in some reasonable distance into the future.”
Well, you framed it in terms of the future of solar output, and I have no prediction there – the Sun does what it does, which has historically been fairly stable. But we can’t influence it, and it’s no use in figuring out what to do. I can’t imagine any situation where it could rationally be said that we can burn carbon without regard for the climate heating effect because we can rely on the Sun to come to the rescue.
Otherwise, I have no specific prediction. The best bet is that there will be warming of .2 or .3 °C/decade, overlaid by the fluctuations with which we are so familiar.

Speaking of conspires, I recently became aware that the WSJ, Guardian, and NYT (among others) have conspired to allow the word “data” to be either singular or plural. “Data” has always been plural (as in “data are”). I am skeptical; unless of course our esteemed host tells me I am wrong.

Dr. Deanster says:
June 16, 2013 at 1:50 pm
So again, I’ll make a call to the more engaged people here … are there any graphs of Maximum Temperature and Minimum Temperature dating back to 1880?? …. 1979??
===
I’m looking too…send out a few contacts…and been looking in all the usual places….like Steven Goddard’s site…no luck just yet…will let you know
..In the mean time 🙂
…A fraction of a degree does not show a trend in the first place….not up or down
look at all the fraction of degrees here..jumping up down every which away….http://www.foresight.org/nanodot/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/histo4.png

@Nick Stokes. Thanks for your best bet. Mine is a perhaps extreme .5°C/decade cooling.
@ PMHinSC. Finding a different word for Data, almost invariably a plural is one thing. But what really annoys me is the use of the word ‘fishes’ as if it were the plural of ‘fish’ which it most definitely is not.
‘Fish’ is both singular and plural. ‘Fishes’ is most definitely not the plural of ‘fish’.

We need to do whatever it takes to eliminate global warming. We should start by eliminating all greenhouse gases and their constituent elements. That includes all substances that include the elements, Hydrogen, Oxygen, Carbon, Nitrogen, and Sulfur, just for starters. That includes most atmospheric gasses except Argon, water, all organic compounds, all carbonate and …nate rocks, and all oxides including sand. Where I live greenhouse gasses get so concentrated that they condense out of the air as a liquid. The city collects this liquid in a network of under ground pipes but instead on destroying this liquid, they just dump it out side the city limits where it is allowed to evaporate back into the atmosphere. The pool of liquid is now enormous and no one does anything about it.

Dr deanster
I can help after a fashion by posting central England temperature seasonal records to 1659http://climatereason.com/Graphs/Graph07.png
The trend line showing change over 350 years is also plotted. Winters have warmed faster than the other seasons and has a big impact on the average mean temperature. Overall, additional Warming is barely distinguishable over the 350 years.
Cet is thought to be a reasonable but by no means perfect proxy for global temperatures.
Global temperatures are a mish mash through the years of ever changing stations. Most would have the averaged temperature rather than the individual maximum or minimum. But no doubt mosh could tell you more if he can spare a minute from his busy schedule of running round blogs making one line comments.
i find that mentioning CET normally brings him here quite quickly
Tonyb

Monckton wrote: “Not long afterwards, and perhaps not coincidentally, he [Jones] produced HadCRUt4. Suddenly the rates of warming during the second and third PDO “warming” phases were changed from 1.6 and 1.7 Cº/century respectively to 1.4 and 1.8 Cº/century respectively.
As with other such instances of data revisionism in the terrestrial data sets, the later period was changed very little because the satellites were watching and prevented cheating. But the record in the earlier period was pushed downwards, artificially steepening the apparent warming over the 20th century. It is as though we knew better than those who took the earlier measurements what measurements they ought to have recorded, all over the world.”
I would like to see Benford’s Law of Leading Digits (and second leading digits) applied to this ‘adjusted’ data set. Auditors have used this law to catch embezzlers trying to “cook the books.” Trying to cook the globe’s temperatures should be similarly prosecuted.

Elizabeth says:
June 16, 2013 at 5:00 am
Undoubtedly ! However, it seems even more ‘paid’ trolls masquerading as ‘concerned’ or ‘inquisitive’ minds are also appearing more often!
I often wonder why they bother? I mean, it is clear from the various threads that they very rarely ‘win’ a point. It is also clear that are extremely zealous in their absolute defence of AGW and NEVER concede a point (no matter how well made).
I think many people find their repetitions irksome. But it also demonstrates how idiotic these people are. I mean, if you have a football team, that costs millions, and you get beat every time you play – what does that say to the casual spectator? It says you are no flipping good!
The warmista come here week in week out and regularly get an education – but in the process enable the skeptics to show how bad the AGW argument actually is – in full public view.
These trolls are the cyber equivalent of the Gore effect – so I suppose as long as they are being stupid, we may as well take advantage? 🙂
BTW – anyone who considers reading any particular newspaper, as grounds for authority or education – is seriously deluded. Sure, read the MSM if you must, but if one is so lazy (and uneducated) as to rely on any particular ‘sole or opined’ source as a the be all and end all of real opinion – one is gonna be embarrased!

I find it interesting that, apart from a couple of misinterpreted emails, the evidence for conspiracy is non-existent yet it comes up time and time again. The rejection of AGW here is often ideological rather than scientific, as witnessed by cwon14′s unsubstantiated rant. I’m interested in the fact that the less secure a man is, the more likely he is to have extreme prejudice.

If none dare call it conspiracy, or even theorize about conspiracies – because, you know, people never hatch plots – maybe you could try coordinated bias.http://www.green-agenda.com/
Because there is no evidence for it, the alarmism about CAGW is purely ideological.

I find it interesting that, apart from a couple of misinterpreted emails, the evidence for conspiracy is non-existent yet it comes up time and time again. The rejection of AGW here is often ideological rather than scientific, as witnessed by cwon14′s unsubstantiated rant. I’m interested in the fact that the less secure a man is, the more likely he is to have extreme prejudice.

If none dare call it conspiracy, or even theorize about conspiracies – because, you know, people never hatch plots – maybe you could try coordinated bias.http://www.green-agenda.com/
Because there is no evidence for it, the alarmism about CAGW is purely ideological.

Monckton wrote: “Not long afterwards, and perhaps not coincidentally, he [Jones] produced HadCRUt4………
And not long after that, one of Jones’ friends came down here and “adjusted” the Australian temperature record using the same procedure. (Stott, iirc)
Nearly all places that once showed cooling in the raw data, now showed warming.

I have not been for most of my life, a ‘it’s the sun’ guy per se. Knowing how impossible it was for the class of gases whose main component is phase change refrigerant, I simply figured over time, people would catch up and put together a composite that answers most questions.
I’m not connected with this guy at all. I don’t know him, I haven’t spoken with him in emails, nothing like that. He doesn’t know me.
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My wife’s got a bad vertebra so I have to keep this short, she’s rolling around, like she took a hit in industry or something, it’s pretty bad. I’ve got to put medicine over it.
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This guy is nicolas scafetta , he’s from Italy. He’s a native Italian speaker and the fact he’s speaking about all this in English is a fairly big deal, he uses a lot of words that only a native English speaker would normally use, because of the descriptive, adjectival nature of sophisticated conversation revolving around several different phases of matter, the chemical reactions in this and that, the discussion that goes around all this requires a lot of vocabulary talent, agreed? Hope so.
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I’m giving this guy the real build up because he’s no bull shooter like the classical wannabes whose drizzling diatribe makes you want to retch that you share however distantly, d.n.a. with the clown. Magic Gassers and Magical Math-ers, Magic energy flow hillbillies –
you know, and I know, the types.
The ones who’d only not be banned on climate sites.
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This guy is N.O.T. one of these circle j**king clowns.
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Introducing to you, one Nicolas Scafetta: he posts here, and no one ever pays him much attention.
Check out this presentation
You will N.O.T. W.A.N.T. your 28 minutes back I promise you that.
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I can’t say so much for Nicolas’ English pronunciation. He kinda slaughters the word “oscillation” saying, “Eye-suh-lay-shun” and when he says “induced,” he says “inn – DEW -Sed” and when he says “Heliosphere” he pronounces “AY-lee-yos-pheer” because he’s coming from a Latin language, Italian.
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I considered whether in all seriousness to recommend cutting to the punch line of this thing or wading through it. I guess you better sit there and take the lull time because he’s GONNA make his point.
And his point needs a LITTLE development. So you can sorta cut through the difficult to understand English I’ll let you see ahead of time what he’s gonna show you: he’s gonna say the combining weights of, the major bodies of the solar system, affect the internal, unseen, mobile, center of gravity, inside the sun: and, that this tug effect, as planetary objects go around, pulling the center of gravity, moves the center of radiance.
K? Not simple sounding at all, right? Very very prone to being milked out for bull$#!+, right?
Okay. When you’re through watching this, you tell me, this guy doesn’t know what he’s talking about to the last punctuation mark.
He says climate on each individual body is easy to get to this same way, and he says for Earth, there’s several different easily identifiable patterns, in this order ascending: 9 years (due to gravity on the moon) 10-11 years, the full-cycle of that, 20-22 years, then 30 years, then the full-cycle of that – 60 years. Then, 200 years, then finally 1,000.
==========
The sort of climax of the whole thing is right around the 20 minute mark, where he says ….” you get this… black LINE.”
It’s like woah. Then he goes through the rest of his spiel. His presentation is a highly logical building block approach outlining IPCC claims about GHG then he explains he and everyone notices the 30 year cycles when looking at earth temps and then he explains that by working from the work of others he’s come to these various conclusions – the main one of this presentation being to show you how, in reality, the 30 year cycles are half-cycles of the highly predominate 60 year cycle of some regular, gas giant physical, hence gravitational, alignments.
=========
Let’s see.. that’s about it. He shows how through using combinations of planetary nearness to the sun, this, that, and the other happens, and that all these gravitational realities are fairly obvious – although he doesn’t really expound on that part a whole lot.
=========
The MAIN thing here is this: if this isn’t worth your 28 minutes, you come in and tell me you think it’s a waste, and I’ll stop putting it up or going on about it. This is the real deal and if you’ve got experience graphing cycles, you’ll see instantly, it is. This guy’s not joking.
Compare what this guy says to what all these other guys say. He owns every pixel on the presentation because every word he says is not just true, he expresses to you how simply it’s all derived.
If Nicola Scafetta spoke really clear English he would single handedly stop the alarm business in
it’s
tracks.
==========
Solar Activity and Climate
Nicola Scafetta, ACRIM & Duke University
The Climate Oscillations: Analysis, Implications, And Their Astronomical Origin.

Eugene says “Professor Jones’ work at East Anglia has added two degrees to the temperature of the earth. Can you imagine how cold England would be if he had not done that?”
One need not imagine… just go there !!

Tonyb
The CET seems to be the only calibrated thermometer record that hasn’t been cruelly adjusted to fit the meme – one must wonder “why not” ” Simple answer may be, too many interested and credible eyes were watching.
Now in Australia and New Zealand theyhave almost got away with wholesale adjustments where it was put about that the old records needed to be (suitably) adjusted down as they read too hot in the past, or “we know thermometers were sited incorrectly”. Lofty authority style statements that were blown away with historic photographs of properly sited Stevenson screens and by reading Official documents.
Then it was,” we had to adjust the thermometer records down as it is “known” (authority again) LIG thermometers read the temperature higher than it was”? so to bring those historic records in line with modern more accurate?? instruments the LIG historic records are adjusted by ??? to our satisfaction ? downwards etc, etc.
When you read the old records and the Australian B.O.M. History, you see how meticulous the “weather men” checked new thermometers against properly calibrated standard thermometers i.e. new instrument calibrated to the old records for historical research value.
For the life of me I cannot see any reason for interferring with long continuous records unless there is some agenda that dictates you MUST change, and even then a scientist would run a parrallel check at the same site if only historical comparison and research value.
The downgrading of historical temperatures DID allow “modern” temperatures to at least LOOK much warmer and strangely it fits the meme of ever upward temperature trending.
Perhaps Nick Stokes and others that took part in the Australian adjustment philosophy would care to set out the careful and complete reasons they allowed this vandalism of the historic temperature records totake place, and why?. Bear in mind that anomally temperatures were routinely checked by BOM staff in those early days to ensure that incorrect readings were weeded out and dealt with at that time.
In my view it is time to have a very careful and sceptical look at both that reasoning, the decision to adjust, the methods, the scrutiny, and audit of the process, otherwise it may well be a case of the lunatics running the climate asylum, climatology? rather than a real scientific study of climate!!

From the abstract to the presentation I linked:
“We will show that several global surface temperature records since 1850 and astronomical records deduced from the orbits of the planets present very similar power spectra. Eleven frequencies with period between 5 and 100 years closely correspond in the terrestrial and astronomical records. Among them, large climate oscillations with peak-to-trough amplitude of about 0.1 K and 0.2 K, and periods of about 20 and 60 years, respectively, are synchronized to the orbital periods of Jupiter and Saturn. Schwabe and Hale solar cycles are also visible in the temperature records. At least a 9.1-year cycle is synchronized to the Moon’s orbital cycles. On multi-secular and millenarian time scales other astronomical cycles appear to be synchronized with known solar activity and the most recent paleoclimate temperature reconstructions. A phenomenological model based on these astronomical cycles can be used to well reconstruct the temperature oscillations since 1850 and to make partial forecasts for the 21st century. It is found that about 60%
of the global warming observed since 1970 has been induced by the combined effect of the 20 and 60-year natural climate oscillations and about 50% of the trending of the secular warming since 1850 has been induced by multi-secular and millennial natural cycles. A partial forecast for the 21st century is proposed. It suggests that climate may stabilize or
cool in the following decades. The empirical solar/planetary model is shown to outperform typical IPCC GCMs in reconstructing climate oscillations and suggests that these models are missing fundamental mechanisms that have their physical origin and their ultimate justification in astronomical phenomena, and in interplanetary and solar-planetary interaction physics.”
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I really want you to be well prepared for what you’re going to see here, because it’s easy to get the idea because Nicola’s English pronuciation’s not very polished, his work might be less than perfect. It’s perfect and there’s just no arguing with being able to chart like he (and the other planetary gravity guys do.)
=======
When someone shows me a thirty minute presentation by some guy in really poor English it’s got to be for real.
This guy’s not kidding around.
LIke I say: if you think he is, you’re obviously – always – invited to come back and tell people what you think of what I’m telling yas.
You will never again IN YOUR LIFE utter the words, “The climate’s not really very well understood.”

kenb said
‘Tonyb
The CET seems to be the only calibrated thermometer record that hasn’t been cruelly adjusted to fit the meme – one must wonder “why not” ” Simple answer may be, too many interested and credible eyes were watching.”
I often refer to CET as the longest and most scrutinised temperature data in existence. too many people follow and plot it for adjustments to be made without there being comment. There may be a political agenda going on here, or there may be the simple fact that we all think we can improve on what has gone before.
The oldest European temperature records had a 7 million euro grant from the EU to ‘reappraise’ them (part of a much larger drive to re-examine the old data).
The result is a book edited by Camuffo and Jones (yes, that one) It is very impressive detective work with a million reasons why the old records were inaccurate and need ‘adjusting.’ An AGW agenda or genuine scientific curiosity? If you are a masochist for infinite detail read their book
‘Improved understanding of past climatic variability from early daily European instrumental sources.’
tonyb

You know, the interesting thing is, it may not even really matter. Adjust the late Holocene numbers as often and as unseen as you wish. It probably does not matter.
Optimistically, there is a 50:50 chance that the Holocene will extend beyond its present half-precessional cycle age. MIS-11, the Holsteinian interglacial, one 400kyr eccentricity cycle back, went long, with only a single end extreme interglacial peak. Of about +21,3M AMSL, and somewhere towards the end of about 20 to 33kyrs.http://si-pddr.si.edu/jspui/bitstream/10088/7516/1/vz_Olson_and_hearty_a_sustained_21m_sea-level_highstand_during_mis_1.pdf
The other one being MIS-19, at the mid Pleistocene Transition (MPT, roughly 0.8-1mya). That one did not achieve our late Holocene msl’s. But it did end with 3 thermal spikes before it tailed off into an ice age:http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0012821X10004681
(paywalled)
The more than singular problem we face here is that we really do not know if the recently past grand solar maxima was the only one (like MIS-11 may have been) that might/will occur at the end- or mid-Holocene, or the first of perhaps three thermals, regardless of source, that terminated the last eccentricity minima Intergladial. MIS-19 ran something on the order of 9-10kyrs. About half a precession cycle…..
We will either “go long” (MIS-11), or we won’t (MIS-19).
In-between, we have MIS-5e and MIS-7. Both had twin thermal peaks. Both occurred between eccentricity maxima and minima. One (MIS-7) did not achieve our Holocene sea levels, the other (MIS-5e) exceeded them. MIS-5e ended with two thermal peaks, the second one being the stronger, and they were very close together at the end of this ~half-precession old extreme interglacial.
It really does not matter if you manipulate the data. It doesn’t really matter how many times. Sooner or later, the Holocene will end. All interglacials since the onset of the Northern Hemisphere Glaciations (NHG) have. The only question that remains is will that be sooner or later?
Astonishingly, It really is just that simple.

Ric Werme says:
June 16, 2013 at 5:09 am
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I have long considered that a possible defence to a speeding claim (unless of course one is caught by the cameras on say motorway that assess the average speed of the vehicle over a distance of a mile or more).
I am not sure whether you are from the UK. If you are from those shores, you will no doubt have read articles about market traders being fined for selling potatoes in lbs instead of kgs (there being some EC directive compelling the sale in metric units), and it was no defence that the market store was selling the potatoes at say 2.2046 lbs per £1 rather than 1 kg per £1.
Your car speedo is calibrated in miles per hour, not feet per second. The national speed limit is expressed in miles per hour, not feet per second. Parliament could have expressed the limit in feet per second, had it wished to do so. Parliament could make it a legal requirement that a car speedo is calibrated in feet per second (not miles per hour), had it desired to do so. It has not
Say a car is travelling along an open road (with no traffic lights or junctions) which has a 40mph speed limit. In one section of the road there are a series of CCTV cameras which are situated exactly 1 mile apart. In between 2 of these CCTV cameras is an automatic traffic camera. It clocks a car doing 67.467 feet per second. The Police charge the motorist with speeding, alleging that the car was doing 46mph contrary to the speed limit. The motorist gets the timed CCTV footage from the cameras and this establishes that in the mile between the cameras the car was infact driving at 37mph.
Have the Police made out their case? I don’t know the answer (since I am unaware that it has ever been tested). However, I would suggest that the defendant would have a respectable case both on technical and on factual issues that the Police have failed to demonstrate that the car breached the speed limit.

Ian W says:
June 16, 2013 at 5:23 am
“…You are conflating two different things.
1. The current rate (or rate of change)
2. The possibility that the current rate (or rate of change) will be maintained”
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I beg to differ.
Infact, it is Lord Monckton who is conflating the second point. He is making an assumption that the measured rate which was measured over a period of about 2 decades will continue at that rate for a century. He makes an extrapolation of the measured data and expresses this in terms of a centenial rate.
Lets assumes that in every decade as from 1997 the satellite data shows a downward temperature trend which more than extinguishes any measured warming in the two decades up to 1996.
In 2079 someone reviews the 100 years worth of satellite data. Would they suggest that it showed warming at a rate of 0.7degC per century, in the early years? I would suggest that they would not. They may say that during 1979 to 1996 it was warming at a rate of 0.07degC per decade (which it was), but not that it was warming at a rate of 0.7degC per century.
If you only have 2 decades worth of data, you cannot give a centenial rate. You are extrapolating data since you do not have a direct measurement, hence you need to caveat your extrapolation, since you are in effect making a guess as to the future (which has not yet been determined). Thus you can say that if that rate were to continue then there would be warming at a rate of 0.7degC per century. But it is better practice not to over reach your data, if you have empirical data measured over decades you should express decadal rates.
In essence, this is simply part of the Feynman point that Stephen Richards (June 16, 2013 at 2:13 am) refers. The extrapolation (ie., the centenial rate) is a guess. It may be an informed guess, but it is a guess none the less. Only the future will determine whether the guess was a good guess or whether it was bad, in that subsequent observation contradicted it (in my assumed scenario, the cooling trend in every decade between 1997 to 2079 would show it to be bad).

Thanks Tonyb
I will be interested to read and check those reason.
I have the official Australian BOM history book and that provides a number of clues to issues that could be used as convenient excuses, but when you have existing records, the historical value is working with those records and understanding whatever differences or deviations may effect your current theories, and this becomes part of the error bars in laymans terms that you factor into your conclusions.
But then commonsense and logic is obviously not a strong point of mutual understanding when you work towards a bias rather than open testable science, it seems.
My regards to you and your research, it is rather forensic and revealing in exposing the historical “buried bodies of climate” that would have been concealed, expunged, erased, but now that evidence canno’t easily be ignored. Keep up the good work!

HadCRUT4 is not a reliable guide to warming. The UAH and RSS satellite data sets are far more reliable. But to use them to advantage you must be aware of their particular features. The super El Nino of 1998 divides the satellite era into two disjunct sections, separated by a step warming. They must not be joined by curve fitting. On the left are ENSO oscillations, on the right is the elevated platform created by the step warming. The step warming was caused by the large amount of water the super El Nino carried across the ocean. It raised global temperature by a third of the degree Celsius and then stopped. This makes the temperature of the entire twentieth century higher than the nineties. To find the general temperature trends you must first use a broad, transparent magic marker to bring out the actual temperature path. Next, put dots in the middle of lines connecting neighboring El Nino peaks with adjacent La Nina valleys. Leave the super El Nino alone. Now connect the dots. The line connecting the dots defines the mean global temperature in the presence of the El Nino oscillations or any other oscillations present. There will be some random deviations but on the left you will get a horizontal straight line from 1979 to 1997. That is an 18 year no-warming stretch. On the right all dots line up, with some scatter, to form a horizontal straight line. The satellite era begins with the year 1979 and these two horizontal straight lines and the super El Nino together take up all of the space available during the satellite era. This leaves no space for the greenhouse effect during the last 34 years. There just wasn’t any. It is also unlikely that any greenhouse warming was hiding in the early periods before the satellite era began. In view of this it is unfruitful to look for any meaningful information about warming rates in HardCRUT4.

Ric Werme says:
June 16, 2013 at 5:09 am
“…In high school, physics was my favorite course. I distinctly recall equations for the vertical velocity of objects in a trajactory (assuming flat Earth and no atmosphere) had a 32t term and used units of feet per second. This produced very nice upside down parabolas in velocity vs. time graphs. (I’ve always liked parabolas.) Now I hear the graphs should have been in one second steps. Those won’t be nearly as pretty, the best I could do is look at trajectorys up to 59 seconds, after that I’d have to use feet per minute. Bummer….”
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On planet Earth some 14 billion years after the big bang, time and gravity are effectively a constant. Since gravity is working on all time scales, your measurements had sufficient data to plot the trajectory. You were not over reaching the bounds of the data that you had collected; you were not over extrapolating the data.
However, that position is radically different to the temperature data sets which are variable on all time scales (hours, days, nights, weeks, months, years, etc). Given this known variability, it is important not to over reach the bounds of the data collected. At all times it is important to keep in mind the limits of the data collected. If you only have a couple of decades of measurements, it is necessary to express your rate in decadal terms, or to add caveats to anything wider.
Errors with trending is one of the major failings in climate science. What mathematician would put a linear straight line fit through the 20th century thermometer record?
Just because something may be similar, or may be a correct mathematical extrapolation does not mean that it possesses the same properties. Consider the old vinyl discs and the tone arm with a needle. The head of the needle is so small that the force exerted on the vinyl record was many tonnes per sq inch. indeed, the needle would slowly cut away at the vinyl. The force per sq inch was far greater than the force excerted by an elephant’s foot. However, it was quite safe to rest the needle on your finger. But to have an elephant step on your finger is an altogether different experience.
The force of the needle per sq inch may be greater than the force of the elephant’s foot, but even though they can be expreesed in the same units, they are not same.

J Martin says:
June 16, 2013 at 2:33 pm
@Nick Stokes. Thanks for your best bet. Mine is a perhaps extreme .5°C/decade cooling.
@ PMHinSC. Finding a different word for Data, almost invariably a plural is one thing. But what really annoys me is the use of the word ‘fishes’ as if it were the plural of ‘fish’ which it most definitely is not.
‘Fish’ is both singular and plural. ‘Fishes’ is most definitely not the plural of ‘fish’.
###
‘Fishes’ is the proper term to use for a group of types of fish. When I talk about the fishes I have kept, I am referring to the various species of fish, not the number of fish.http://crofsblogs.typepad.com/english/2005/02/fish_or_fishes.html

Here is one for Nick to muddle over. This comment is from the ‘NZ Greens lose interest;\’ post and ties in well with Lord Monckton,s premise….
—————————————————————————-
pat says:
June 16, 2013 at 10:20 am
The falsification of the temperature data by NIWA was publicized in a manner that was easily understood. The NIWA temperature records were adjusted without the public being told. As there were only 11 old weather stations, the data was limited to an understandable quanta. When the real data was located in the National Library (where it resided unbeknownst to NIWA), the difference was easy to see. The past had been made colder.
—————————————————–
The real data was discovered. What a bummer. Can’t these agw people do anythinbg right?

KenB says: June 16, 2013 at 4:20 pm“Perhaps Nick Stokes and others that took part in the Australian adjustment philosophy would care to set out the careful and complete reasons they allowed this vandalism of the historic temperature records totake place, and why?”
My last direct contact with BoM records was in 1980. But all this talk of “vandalism of the historic temperature records” is plain silly. I don’t think BoM have done anything like that, but in any case the main records are on the GHCN unadjusted file. These are the numbers as originally transcribed in the GHCN project of the early 1990’s and distributed on CD, and updated directly from CLIMAT files submitted every month by the national Mets. The numbers don’t change.

richard verney says:
June 16, 2013 at 2:26 am
“…
as a matter of first principle, one cannot extrapolate a data set over a period greater than that which it covers.
…
This is not being pedantic. This is what the data shows. One must not over extrapolate beyond the bounds of the data set. False impressions result from such over extrapolations.”

So… the Highway Patrol is “over extrapolating” if they cite me for doing 75MPH in 65MPH zone because they only timed me for, say, 30 seconds instead of following and timing me for full hour? That what you’re saying?
Good luck with that in court.

PMHinSC says:
June 16, 2013 at 2:15 pm
Speaking of conspires, I recently became aware that the WSJ, Guardian, and NYT (among others) have conspired to allow the word “data” to be either singular or plural. “Data” has always been plural (as in “data are”). I am skeptical; unless of course our esteemed host tells me I am wrong.

———–
Nigel S says:
October 12, 2011 at 5:46 am
POD has:
data n.pl. (also treated as sing., although the singular form is strictly datum) 1 known facts used for inference or in reckoning. 2 quantities or characters operated on by a computer etc. [Latin data from do give]
Usage (1) In scientific, philosophical, and general use, this word is usually considered to denote a number of items and is thus treated as plural with datum as the singular. (2) In computing and allied subjects (and sometimes in general use), it is treated as a mass (or collective) noun and used with words like this, that, and much, with singular verbs, e.g. useful data has been collected. Some people consider use (2) to be incorrect but it is more common than use (1). However, data is not a singular countable noun and cannot be preceded by a, every, each, either, or neither, or be given a plural form datas.
commieBob says:
October 12, 2011 at 7:41 am
Noun data is “singular mass noun when the emphasis is on its collective or cumulative nature” (Allen 15). Example: We need to be sure that our data is in a form that can be used by other institutions. Data is sometimes used in plural in “contexts where the individuality of the items of information is important, or when language purists insist on its full grammatical value, although it sounds awkward or affected” (Allen 16): Data have been obtained from some 1500 diary respondents. http://www.languagebits.com/grammar/collective-nouns-in-english-2/
PeterW (19:49:26) :
The word `data’, in English, is a singular mass noun. It is thus a deliberate archaism and a grammatical and stylistic error to use it as a plural.
The Latin word data is the neuter plural past participle of the first conjugation verb dare, `to give’.
The Latin word ‘data’ appears to have made its way into English in the mid 17th century making its first appearance in the 1646 sentence `From all this heap of data it would not follow that it was necessary.’
Note that this very first appearance of the word in English refers to a quantity of data, a `heap’, rather than a number.
The English word `data’ is therefore a noun referring variously to measurements, observations, images, and the other raw materials of scientific enquiry.
`Data’ now refers to a mass of raw information, which is measured rather than counted, and this is as true now as it was when the word made its 1646 debut.
‘Data’ is naturally and consistently used as a mass noun in conversation: the question is asked how much data an instrument produces, not how many; it is asked how data is archived, not how they are archived; there is talk of less data rather than fewer; and talk of data having units, saying they have a megabyte of data, or 10 CDs, or three nights, and never saying `I have 1000 data’ and expecting to be understood.
The universal perception of data as measured rather than counted puts the word firmly and unambiguously in the same grammatical category as `coal’, `wheat’ and `ore’, which is that of the mass, or aggregate, noun.
As such, it is always and unavoidably grammatically singular. No one would ask `how many wheat do you have?’ or say that `the ore are in the train’ if one wished to be thought a competent speaker of English; in the same way, and to the same extent, we may not ask `how many data do you have?’ or say `the data are in the file’ without committing a grammatical error.
PeterW (14:35:34) :
Data is; data is an English word. English includes many words originally press-ganged from Latin, which have changed their grammatical type.
As has been pointed out far more eloquently than I can:
“The majority of writers who would dutifully pluralise `data’ in writing naturally and consistently use it as a mass noun in conversation: they ask how much data an instrument produces, not how many; they talk of how data is archived, not how they are archived; they talk of less data rather than fewer; and they talk of data with units, saying they have a megabyte of data, or 10 CDs, or three nights, and never saying `I have 1000 data’ and expecting to be understood.
If challenged, they will respond that `data is a Latin plural’. Agree to this, for the sake of professional harmony, and carry on the conversation, making sure to mention that `the telescope has data many odd images tonight’ (it’s a past participle after all), suggest looking at the data raw images (…or an adjective) and that you both examine the datorum variance (surely they recall the genitive plural); suggest they give you the datis (…the dative), so that you can redo the analysis with their datis (…and the ablative). If they object ask them to explain their sentimental attachment to the nominative plural, that they would use that in all cases, in brute defiance of good Latin grammar.
*********
Myself:

Deadman wrote:“If you choose to use a Latin word, you have to get the plural correct.”

That’s not so. Fowler, in Modern English Usage, states, “Latin plurals sometimes become singular English words (e.g., agenda, stamina) …” As long as it’s OK to employ those words as singulars, it’s OK to do the same for “data.”
Not only is it acceptable to use “data” as a collective singular, using data as a plural word is incorrect because it throws the speaker (including those who use “data are”) into inconsistency with his habitual method of speaking, as Phillip W. pointed out. He wrote: “‘Data’ is naturally and consistently used as a mass noun in conversation: the question is asked how much data an instrument produces, not how many; it is asked how data is archived, not how they are archived; there is talk of less data rather than fewer; and talk of data having units, saying they have a megabyte of data, …” For another example of this usage, look at the post … where the phrase “the raw data is gone” is used.
Because of this inconsistency with long-established and near-universal usage, and because, as Fowler shows, there is no real rule forbidding “data is,” “data are” will never be accepted–it will always sound odd or even affected.
It’s counterproductive to criticize “data is,” because the people criticized will not change their habit, but be determined to pay no attention to any similar criticism in the future. This sort of backlash is what happened 100 years ago after schoolmarm grammarians made a fetish of not splitting an infinitive, distinguishing between shall and will, etc. They lost the war, by going a bridge too far.

keeping with the “fish” theme, a laugh:
17 June: ABC Australia: Kirsty Nancarrow: Experts test how fish cope with climate change
Researchers from James Cook University in north Queensland and the Australian National University are hoping to prove mature fish can develop to cope with climate change…
PhD student Sandra Binning says the adult fish will be tested after one month to see how they are reacting to simulated changes in weather patterns.
“We know that with little fish that are very small we can rear them in different conditions and have them develop into athletes or lazy fish per se,” she said.
“Now this is exactly what we’re testing with this – whether we can take adult fish that have already been living out on the reef in conditions for many, many months, but whether we can take them into the lab and train them and try to get them to change and become better athletes…http://www.abc.net.au/news/2013-06-17/experts-test-how-fish-cope-with-climate-change/4759954?section=qld

@cwon14. And, nonetheless, research (among other things) can exhibit all the attributes of what you consider a conspiracy and not be a conspiracy. Consider previous academic/scientific “fashions” such as Chomskyan linguistics or medical lipophobia, both backed by systematically bad science (and lack of). IMO, the error is in your definition of “conspiracy”.

Nick Stokes
Ducking between posts here and posts on the Trenberth wobbly charts at Lucia’s. Personally, and in regard to the Geckko (Comment #116055) The adjusters seem to have been active in the past and I do not at this stage, trust your unajusted to be what you say it is. I’d like an independent auditor/investigator to have full access to check the records.
You and Mosh can poo poo all you like at our suspicions, but such is the credibility deficit that has been built up by defenders of the faith, and I include you in that implicitly; only a truly independent and searching investigation will restore my respect for truly unadjusted or raw data written by the original collectors of the information.
As interest in weather keeps people active and searching through old records that survive in dusty receptacles all over the world (and here in Australia) much is being revealed and it doesn’t look good for your faithful position. Especially so, in Australia where you must cringe at the statements made by various climate commissioners and others with no climate experience or even common knowledge of weather.
Political change is in the air and who will be blamed, time will tell.
Climate/weather is a humbling subject of interest to us all. I tend to think that Professor Murry Salby has laid most of it, if not all, of the C02 meme to rest, perhaps you and a few Climate Commissioners should debate with him on his findings- public debate of course on the ABC – I’d like to see that. Perhaps a series of debates!!
I do appreciate the openess of your reply.
.

Mr. Arrak makes a point that Fred Singer has been making for some years: that the satellite data from 1979-1997 and from 1999-present show little global warming, but that over the entire period – this time including 1998 – there appears to have been significant warming thanks to the naturally-occurring Great el Niño of that year.
WUWT readers may like to have the numbers on this, which nicely illustrate Mr. Arrak’s point. I have taken the arithmetic mean of the RSS and UAH monthly lower-troposphere anomalies (permissible because the areas of coverage, though not identical, are close enough).
Over the 228 months January 1979 to December 1997, CO2 forcing was 0.4 Watts per square meter and the world warmed at a rate equivalent to 0.6 K/century.
Over the 173 months January 1999 to May 2013, CO2 forcing was 0.4i Watts per square meter and the world warmed at a rate equivalent to 0.9 K/century.
Over the 413 months January 1979 to May 2013, CO2 forcing was 0.9 Watts per square meter and the world warmed at a rate equivalent to 1.3 K/century.
The warming rate over the entire period of satellite record since 1979 seems significantly above the periods either side of 1998 because the Great el Niño of that year was an outstanding outlier. That outlier is not as strongly countervailed by the 1997 la Niña in the satellite data as it is in the HadCRUt4 dataset, so the outlier has a distorting effect, significantly but artificially increasing the apparent warming rate since 1979.

“… produced HadCRUt4. Suddenly the rates of warming during the second and third PDO “warming” phases were changed from 1.6 and 1.7 Cº/century respectively to 1.4 and 1.8 Cº/century respectively. ”
Was this the way of ‘dealing’ with your recent request for correction, once again pointing out the bogus statistical trick in AR4 ?
ie. finding some ‘plausible basis’ on which to modify the original data, to better’fit’ with what it’s being used to show.
One wonders how many data points had to suffer in the making of that conclusion.

F. Ross says:
June 16, 2013 at 7:34 pm
////////////////////////////////////////
See my comment at 05:26pm which further elaborates.
It is a mixed question of (i) the manner in which the offence is defined; and (ii) the evidence adduced in support of the allegation that the offence has been committed.
I have never had a traffic offence, so I have never had cause to look at the definition, and I have assumed that it is defined on the basis of miles per hour, not feet per second. Of course, it could be defined in terms of miles per hour or such equivalent expressed in any other unit of distance and interval of time. If it is defined along the latter lines then there would not be the same technical issue based upon the definition of the offence.
The reason why people do not get off is that they have no contrary evidence. The Police provide photographic evidence which, subject to the technical issue based upon definition, at first glance supports the charge against the motorist. The motorist has no objective evidence to counter that. But see my example at 05:26pm which gave the motorist objective evidence to counter the case and evidence presented by the Police.
Now consider an extreme example. Say one has a motoraway which has both a minimum speed limit (which applies at all times that the car is driving on the motorway) and a maximum speed limit. Lets say that the minimum speed limit is 40mph and the maximum speed limit is 70mph. As soon as you exit/leave the motorway, the maximum speed limit on that road is 30mph. So to summarise, it is an offence on the motorway to drive at less than 40mph and an offence on the road at the end of the motorway to drive at above 30mph.
Just at the end of the motorway, there is a traffic control camera. Its fied of vision covers the last 50 metres of the motorway and the first 50 metres of the road after the end of the motorway. You drive along the motorway at 40.01mph and at the precise point (measured to nanmetres) you reach the end of motorway sign, you brake and then proceed at 29.7mph. However, with reaction time and braking efficiency it takes say 2 seconds to slow from 40.001mph to 29.99mph. The camera takes a photo showing that you covered say the first 10 metres of the road after the motorway at 36mph, in breach of the maximum 30mph speed limit. Had you braked 2 seconds earlier (ie., before the end of the motorway), the camera would have produced a photo showing that you covered the last 10 metres of the motorway at 34mph, in breach of the minimum 40mph speed limitt?
Have you committed an offence? Has the evidence that the Police obtained proved that you have committed the offence? Would an objective observer (ie., the jury) accept the evidence produced by the Police as establishing that an offence has been committed?
As I said in my 05:26pm comment, I do not know the answer, but I certainly can see the runnable arguments.

It is like going to the Optician, who keeps trying different lenses until you see an image that suits you.
History of warming through the revisionist’s lense is rather depressing for the bit in the middle.

astrodragon says:
June 17, 2013 at 12:24 am
“You call it revisionism.
I call it lying and misappropriation of grant money.”
///////////////////////////////
Hansen has adjusted some of the data about a dozen, or so, times. What cause can there be in the late 20th century/early 21st century to adjust temperature measurements recorded say in the 1930s half a dozen, or even a dozen times?
Some adjustment may have been necessary. Methods and understanding may after some time be further refined and better understood, necessitated a further adjustment. But 6 to 12 adjustments? Come on folks! At the very least this suggests that Hansen does not know what he is doing, and/or the reasons for the adjustments are uncertain and questionable, and/or that he is down right incompetent having previously and repeatedly made so many incorrect adjustments.
Given the repeated nature of the adjustments, there can be no confidence in the accuracy of the homogenized data set. In fact, the one adjustment that is crying out to be made is that of and incidental to UHI, and this is one that Hansen copiously fails to properly and adequately get a grips with.
If every adjustment and every revision to that adjustment was to be properly audited by an independent scientist (with no skin in the game either way) I consider that it may well emerge that there is a strong case of misappropriation of grant money.
Given the essentially flat temperature trend between 1979 and say 1996/7 recorded in the satellite data set, that set suggests that there was no significant post 1979 warming, and raises the possibility that the land based thermometer temperature sets are polluted when they show warming during that period. That pollution being an artefact of adjustments, UHI, siting issues and station drop outs.
The best temperature record that we have is the satellite data set. Unfortunately, it is of short duration and this limits it effectiveness as to amking reasonable extrapolations of trends.
Of course, it is the ocean temperature data set that is the most relevant, but pre ARGO, it is riddled with uncertainties. The ARGO data set is presently of too short a duration to enable any worthwhile extrapolation (or to answer the Trenberth conjecture)

KenB says: June 16, 2013 at 8:23 pm
“The adjusters seem to have been active in the past and I do not at this stage, trust your unajusted to be what you say it is. I’d like an independent auditor/investigator to have full access to check the records.”
The system is open, you can check it yourself. I gave a link above to the current GHCN unadjusted, and said that it’s recent values consist of numbers transcribed from the CLIMAT forms submitted by national Met Offices. Here you can inspect those forms as submitted monthly over the last twenty years.

Nick
Almost next to useless, I think I will do my own research on the documents themselves, rather than wrestle with a system not designed for easy checking and validation and just 20 years?
As far as Australian records are concerned the BOM printed reports issued are easier to check, now can you direct me to existing reports where the alterations to the Australian Historical temperature records were approved and reasons given for that approval. Just askin!!

Ideology is an aspect that makes it difficult to engage in enriching discussions on climate change. Several months ago, the University of Kentucky hosted of forum on climate change with three excellent speakers who were all self-described conservatives. Liberals reported how they better understand that there are thoughtful conservative perspectives on, and solutions to, climate change, thus allowing for a broadened public discussion. In turn, conservatives in attendance learned the same thing. You can watch the recording of this event at http://bit.ly/135gvNa. The starting time for each speaker is noted at this page, so you can listen to the speakers of greatest interest to you.

PMHinSC says:
June 16, 2013 at 2:15 pm
“Speaking of conspires, I recently became aware that the WSJ, Guardian, and NYT (among others) have conspired to allow the word “data” to be either singular or plural. “Data” has always been plural (as in “data are”).”
For me “data is” is intolarable for the ear but I am told that it is common usage in the US, especially amongst people who have no classical education and have no clue of the origin of the word. It appears that the disappearance of the plural meaning of “data” may follow the same path as the word “agenda” which is now exclusively used in the singular sense, yet it is the plural form of agendum. Whether the horrific “datas” will come into use is questionable, although the word “agendas” has also become acceptable. So who knows.

KenB says: June 17, 2013 at 4:13 am
“now can you direct me to existing reports…”
No. If you’re going to maintain that GHCN unadjusted are faked and can’t be bothered looking up where they come from, then it’s just a waste of my time.

Imagine a global contest, established to settle, once and for all, the age old mystery of gravity. All over the world people design different experiments. Some drop feathers. Some drop lead balls. Some design little ramps with wheeled test vehicles zipping down for measurements.
As the results flow in, horror of horrors, the mystery is creating gobs of conflicted data. ‘Scientists’ with the highest soap box, tweak the conflicts to bring them into alignment with their own experiment, obviously the most brilliant and enlightened of them all. It’s supported by models that confirm the correctness of their theory.
Few think to go back to the experiments to search for underlying physical drivers to the conflicted data. It’s too hard you see. There are too many variables. It’s a chaotic contest.
Still, there is a reason for every conflict, and therein lies the science. You don’t get science from a model. You get confirmation of your biases; useful to root them out but useless for anything else.

I’m sorry, adjusting the raw data is not justifalbe in any sense. It would be like going back and adjusting Major League Baseball home run records and saying that because Babe Ruth hit home runs in undersize parks by today’s standards that we have to “adjust” his home run totals down by 50! It rubbish!

IMO Nick Stokes has become a far worse than annoying yabut.
Every time a discussion addresses anything specific he dodges the essence with “yeah but look over here at something else” while picking nits and pretending it is the same as joining the discussion and debating the same issue.
It is not.
This thread is about “data revisionism”.
Many are discussing what appears to be unjustified adjustments to temperature record by various climate researchers.
Stokes says looks over here at these other records which he says are available and un-adjusted while having never acknowledged or addressed any data revision by anyone.
Nick, is it your pretense than no data revision by anyone has occurred?
And that anyone seeing any is either imagining or inventing the revisions?
If so say so.
If you can acknowledge there have been revisions explain why they are justified.
And do it slowly so us simple people can understand.

Dr. Deanster
Further to Tmin and Tmax
Most of the temperature numbers we see are averages of averages of averages, such that no knowledge remains regarding patterns at the ;microclimate level. Sad, because all other trends, anomalies etc., are statistical artifacts, not reality on the ground. One of the few researches into local climate patterns on a station-by-station basis was done by JR Wakefield. His analysis and conclusions can be found here:http://www.scribd.com/doc/25995131/Ontario-Surface-Temperature-Trends-no-Warming-happening

DesertYote says:
June 16, 2013 at 6:51 pm
J Martin says:
June 16, 2013 at 2:33 pm
@ PMHinSC. Finding a different word for Data, almost invariably a plural is one thing. But what really annoys me is the use of the word ‘fishes’ as if it were the plural of ‘fish’ which it most definitely is not.
‘Fish’ is both singular and plural. ‘Fishes’ is most definitely not the plural of ‘fish’.
‘Fishes’ is the proper term to use for a group of types of fish. When I talk about the fishes I have kept, I am referring to the various species of fish, not the number of fish.
How about fishies as in
“Down in the meadow in a little bitty pool
Swam three little fishies and a mama fishie too
“Swim” said the mama fishie, “Swim if you can”
And they swam and they swam all over the dam”

PMHinSC says:
June 17, 2013 at 6:50 am
DesertYote says:
June 16, 2013 at 6:51 pm
J Martin says:
June 16, 2013 at 2:33 pm
@ PMHinSC. Finding a different word for Data, almost invariably a plural is one thing. But what really annoys me is the use of the word ‘fishes’ as if it were the plural of ‘fish’ which it most definitely is not.
‘Fish’ is both singular and plural. ‘Fishes’ is most definitely not the plural of ‘fish’.
‘Fishes’ is the proper term to use for a group of types of fish. When I talk about the fishes I have kept, I am referring to the various species of fish, not the number of fish.
How about fishies as in
“Down in the meadow in a little bitty pool
Swam three little fishies and a mama fishie too
“Swim” said the mama fishie, “Swim if you can”
And they swam and they swam all over the dam”
###
‘Fishie’ is a dimmunitive of ‘fish’. It is singular. The proper English plural of this dimmunitive is ‘fishies’. The dimmunitive of a word is a different word and therfor can follow different rules.
Anyway, ‘fish’ is always sigular, whether refering to an individual fish or to a single group of fish.
( I can’t belevle I am actualy writing about English grammer. What have I become? Oy!)

@Txomin says: 11:43 pmit is not rare to find studies that fiddle with values in order to support otherwise untenable hypotheses. This does not constitute conspiracy. It simply is bad science….
Wikipedia: “a conspiracy is an agreement between two or more persons to commit a crime at some time in the future.”
In criminal law, fraud is intentional deception made for personal gain or to damage another individual;
Fraud is a crime.
“fiddle with values in order to support an otherwise untenable hypothesis”…. would be an intentional deception.
If the deception involves personal gain (either monetarily in the form of grants, employment, or political status) or damage to others, then the deception constitutes fraud.
If two or more people are aware of the deception — and say nothing to expose the deception, or indeed act to continue the deception, then two or more people have agreed to commit fraud.
It is bad science.
It is also conspiracy.
QED

I’m sorry, adjusting the raw data is not justifiable in any sense. It would be like …adjusting Major League Baseball home run records … because Babe Ruth hit home runs in undersize parks by today’s standards that we have to “adjust” his home run totals down by 50!

I like this analogy very much. Perhaps the records books do need a footnote documenting X number of Babe Ruth’s home runs occurred is stadiums smaller than any that exist today. Add useful information to increase uncertainty and doubt over existing information. But to change the data is at best an attempt to hide real uncertainty. At worst, it replaces truth with falsehood.

RonC …. thanks.
With all the talk about adjustments to data, the Max Min data are of the utmost importance. In the context of it all, TOBS adjustments seem to be of an importance, but suffice it to say, regardless of what time you observe the temp, a Maximum temp can’t go “down”, it can only go up. LIkewise, a Minimum temp can only go down, not up. The only adjustments I can see that would lower the Maximum temperature would be adjustments for equipment, or adjustments for changes in the environment like change of location, UHI or Agriculture. On the otherhand, from what I’ve gathered reading the comments and articles of people better versed than me, Mimimum Temperature would be the opposite, adjusting down for increased mixing due to Urbanization, or adjusting down due to changes in the environment, like increased humidity resulting from irrigation.
I’m afraid that the gurus who run global temp metrics are trying to adjust the “averaged” temperature based on issues that actually only affect the mimimum or maximum, and would affect them in opposite directions.

I would like to ask the community a favor. Regarding temperature, it has often been noted that Maximum Temps have not warmed, but that Minimum Temps have, thus the Average Temp rises due to lower limit rising. I’ve never seen a graph with these data!
Do any of you have any reference that shows a graph dating back to 1880, that shows Maximum Temperature, and MInimum Temperature graphed separately, or even better, on the same graph??

Dr Deanster (and others asking much the same thing),
While I don’t have data beyond the late 20’s, and I don’t take much value of the data before the 50’s. I have compiled Min/Max data right from the daily NCDC station records. I’ve also processed a difference between today’s increase in temp minus tonight’s drop in temp here.
Lord Monckton,
I think you’d like what I show as well. There is no loss of cooling since the 50’s, where the average night time drop is almost identical as the day’s warming. And as a overall average from 1950 to 2011 there’s slightly more cooling than warming.

Dr. Deanster says:
June 17, 2013 at 9:35 am
FWIW – I have no idea of the history of the max-min/2 and why it was derived/adopted, but to me, who actually took some weather obs many years ago, I fail to understand why it is considered any kind of metric, ‘average’ or otherwise. As any hiker, sailor, or any ‘outdoors’ person can attest, weather and temperature can pass very quickly or very slowly, thereby affecting the ‘real’ – as in actual – local ‘average’ temperature of the day quite significantly. I can understand using one or the other as a ‘valid’ measurement, so long as the max and min are read at the same time each day – but adding and dividing by 2 does not equate to an average temperature for any given day!
I have major reservations about the temp datasets for this and the UHI reasons but as Mosher is often keen to state – we have to use what we have got! All in all, IMHO, the temp datasets, and any derivation thereof are the subject of numerous inherent and introduced errors (and bias, if you consider the way adjustments can be made). The statistical treatment, averaging, gridding, adjustment, etc of this data does not instill any confidence either!

Nick Stokes says:
June 16, 2013 at 7:20 pm
goldminor says: June 16, 2013 at 7:12 pm
“Here is one for Nick to muddle over. …When the real data was located in the National Library”
Same deal. Did they think to look on the GHCN unadjusted file?
——————————————————————————————
What would the GHCN have to do with a database in New Zealand?

Kev-in-UK ….
I for one do not buy the TOBS b.s. I can remember many a day when a cold front came in, when in was warmer at 6AM and freezing at 3:30 PM. Granted .. on average … coolest temp of the day is just before sun rise …. hottest temp of the day is usually around 3-5 pm, but regardless of when you measured the temperature, the Minimum can only go colder and the Maximum can only go higher.
Now .. we have Hansen and the gang artificially cooling the past. I don’t see where they get the justification to such, unless they have some proven data regarding instrument changes or station movements. Somehow, I doubt real seriously that anyone has actually looked at each record
MiCrow …thanks .. great stuff. That is exactly what I was looking for. Looking at your graphs, I don’t see any unprecedented warming. While, as you note, the 1940s data is a tad erratic, it clearly is as warm or warmer then than it is now. Expressing the data in real terms, as opposed to exaggerated “anomaly” data is refreshing as well, and shows just how insignificant today’s weather is compared to the last 70 years.
Maybe you should get with Anthony Watts and figure out a way to present and automatically update those graphs on the Temperature Reference Page..

Peter in MD says:
June 17, 2013 at 5:44 am
I’m sorry, adjusting the raw data is not justifalbe in any sense. It would be like going back and adjusting Major League Baseball home run records and saying that because Babe Ruth hit home runs in undersize parks by today’s standards that we have to “adjust” his home run totals down by 50! It rubbish!
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Great analogy! All other players from that era also had to play within those same boundaries. So the Babe,s performance is justified as compared to the performance of his peers.

richard verney says:
June 16, 2013 at 2:56 am Like many others who read this blog, I am far from convinced that we have a proper handle on UHI and the extent to which the data sets may have become contaminated by this (and I include station drop outs). I know that Anthony is working hard on this. It is not a straight forward exercise.
Exactly. A great deal of the thermometers making the land based data sets are located around human agglomerations and cover a period when the human population grew from 1 billion to 7. It is enough to look at Berkeley’s chart where the dots showing a cooling trend and warming trend are plotted on a map, to recognise the groups of warming islands exactly there where the human agglomerations are.
We all know the UHI phenomenon, we all drive between smaller and bigger cities and can watch how the UHI is influencing the car thermometer. Is it equal for a small city with a big city? Depending on the size most smaller cities create a much smaller delta UHI then bigger cities.
Somehow climatologists try to make us believe the delta UHI from 1850 to today has not influenced at all the thermometers. According to them the cities in 1850 created the same delta UHI as today all over the globe.
Also what is the UHI influence when one is going more to the north? The delta UHI will be higher for a city of similar size and build in higher latitudes. And one can easily see the measured warming being higher in higher latitudes.
But it is not only cities, there are all kind of heat sources and the only study that addressed those is Watts et all 2012http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/07/29/press-release-2/

How many other potential factors are there? Solar system, galactic, or univeral fluctuations? Could dark matter affect our climate? Magnetic fields? Are there longer term trends and cycles that we have no capability to recognize?
It seems far too intertwined and complicated to pin down with any precision. the ‘experts’ have told us they can, while their prognostications indicate otherwise. Unabated in their imagined prescience, albeit increasingly vague, a trend in unbridled hubris is becoming the most easily discerned. And most dangerous.

MiCro says:
June 17, 2013 at 9:42 am
“I have compiled Min/Max data right from the daily NCDC station records.”
Though few people noticed, the plots in your article* indirectly provide a very, very important result of showing that temperatures in the 1940s were as warm as now or warmer both for the globe, for the northern hemisphere, and for the southern hemisphere if looked at in such instrumental data without the “adjustments” of such as Hansen’s GISS / the CRU / the Met Office.
*http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/05/17/an-analysis-of-night-time-cooling-based-on-ncdc-station-record-data/
While you made a good point in that article, I found that unhighlighted part, which was generally unnoticed, even more interesting, as such global unadjusted raw instrumental temperature data is ordinarily never, ever, ever published today in such a convenient plot form, never before seen as broadly in many hours of personally reading WUWT and elsewhere. (For example, no plot on http://wattsupwiththat.com/reference-pages/global-weather-climate/global-temperature/ is remotely equivalent).
“I don’t take much value of the data before the 50′s.”
While contradictory to widely-publicized plots today in which high temperatures around the 1940s are gone from what they depict for the historical record, actually it more fits old publications like what is seen in http://img240.imagevenue.com/img.php?image=40530_DSCN1557_nat_geog_1976_1200x900_122_75lo.JPG which was made back in the relatively apolitical era.
And it relatively suits a bigger picture like that in http://s9.postimg.org/3whiqcrov/climate.gif where the top of the preceding, enlarging on click, is from Holgate 2007, which found the sea level rise rate was “larger in the early part of last century (2.03 ± 0.35 mm/yr 1904–1953), in comparison with the latter part (1.45 ± 0.34 mm/yr 1954–2003).”

How many other potential factors are there? Solar system, galactic, or univeral fluctuations? Could dark matter affect our climate? Magnetic fields? Are there longer term trends and cycles that we have no capability to recognize?

I’m fond of tidal effects of the planets on the Sun, we know it wobbles around the Solar systems CoG by quite a lot for something as massive as the Sun is (1.989E30 kg).

Monckton of Brenchley says:
June 16, 2013 at 10:25 pm
….so the outlier has a distorting effect, significantly but artificially increasing the apparent warming rate since 1979.
__________________________________
trim the mean.

Gunga Din says: June 17, 2013 at 3:43 pm
markx says: June 17, 2013 at 10:46 am
“What is the collective noun for climate modelers?”
Well known: An incompetency of climate modelers.
===================================================================
Or a SciFi Convention?
A Cacophony of Scicobabble?
A Hockey Team
____________________
Flakes misusing basic statistics. In undergraduate we knew they were in the easy “soft” sciences like environmental biology, political science, sociology and psychology. They’ve grown up to be climate scientists and climate modelers with an axe to grind.

Nick Stokes says:
June 16, 2013 at 2:11 pmI can’t imagine any situation where it could rationally be said that we can burn carbon without regard for the climate heating effect because we can rely on the Sun to come to the rescue.
The reason we can “burn carbon” without regard to the climate heating effect has nothing to do with what the sun does or doesn’t do. The reason is that the heating effect is so small that it doesn’t matter one iota. It can’t be rationally said that our CO2 emmissions are in any way a danger to our climate without evidence. If we need to fear something, we should fear cooling, which is the real danger. You live in a dream world. Come back to reality, Nick. It’s not so bad.

REGARDING THE PLURAL OF LATIN WORDS IN ENGLISH.
i got news for you — Latin words adopted into the English language become English words. Being now English words their plurals are created by applying the rules of English not Latin. i quote myself.
Great nations in vanquished millenniums
Foretold their fall with one same cry
When its arts begin to die
A civilization soon succumbs
In Shakespeare’s age the educated still learned Latin in their schooling. It was a common tongue and though Latin words may have been used in English texts they were still recognized as being “Latin”. (In fact one of the secrets of the sonnets is that a printing convention at the time italicized all “foreign words” in a text. This printing convention shortly changed and the practice was dropped. This convention has largely been forgotten leaving inadequate scholars puzzled about the italicized words in the sonnets.) Now very few people speak Latin and most people don’t know from what language particular “English” words are derived.
When the English language makes a word its own then the rules of English apply. Of course, English being what it is, who knows what the future holds. Latin endings could make a comeback.
Eugene WR Gallun

Manipulating the temperature data does not change reality. It is difficult to imagine how the warmist’s propaganda machine will react to unequivocal global cooling.
It appears we are going to experience a ‘little ice age’. The Medieval Warm period was followed by the Little Ice Age. There were crop failures in the UK and in Northern Europe during the ‘Little Ice age’ due to cold, wet weather. There will be reduced yield and crop failures in Canada and in Russia, if there is significant cooling.http://www.solen.info/solar/images/comparison_recent_cycles.pnghttp://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/06/02/coldest-spring-in-england-since-1891/http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-22866982
Britain’s wheat crop ‘down by third after extreme weather’ Britain’s wheat crop could be below average for the second year in a row, the NFU warned Continue reading the main story
Britain’s wheat harvest this year could be almost 30% smaller than it was last year because of extreme weather, the National Farmers’ Union has warned… ….Britain’s wheat crop could be below average for the second year in a row, the NFU warnedhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Ice_Age
Little Ice Age
The Little Ice Age (LIA) was a period of cooling that occurred after the Medieval Warm Period (Medieval Climate Optimum).[1] While it was not a true ice age, the term was introduced into the scientific literature by François E. Matthes in 1939.[2] It has been conventionally defined as a period extending from the 16th to the 19th centuries,[3][4][5] or alternatively, from about 1350 to about 1850,[6] though climatologists and historians working with local records no longer expect to agree on either the start or end dates of this period, which varied according to local conditions ….

Eugene WR Gallun says:
i got news for you — Latin words adopted into the English language become English words. Being now English words their plurals are created by applying the rules of English not Latin.
So what is the plural of the adopted now singular word “data”? Datas like agendas? Ha, ha, you must be joking!

Eugene WR Gallun says:
i got news for you — Latin words adopted into the English language become English words. Being now English words their plurals are created by applying the rules of English not Latin.

So what is the plural of the adopted now singular word “data”? Datas like agendas? Ha, ha, you must be joking!

=================================================================
He can correct me if I’m wrong, but the Latin plurals have “hung on” longer for words that were and are primarily used in academic circles. But not just for Latin or science. “Cherubim” is the plural for “cherub”.

Eugene WR Gallun says:
June 17, 2013 at 7:14 pm
In Shakespeare’s age the educated still learned Latin in their schooling. It was a common tongue and though Latin words may have been used in English texts they were still recognized as being “Latin”. (In fact one of the secrets of the sonnets is that a printing convention at the time italicized all “foreign words” in a text. This printing convention shortly changed and the practice was dropped. This convention has largely been forgotten leaving inadequate scholars puzzled about the italicized words in the sonnets.) Now very few people speak Latin and most people don’t know from what language particular “English” words are derived.

===================================================================
The King James version of the Bible usually used italicized words when the translators added English words that didn’t have a corresponding Greek or Hebrew word in the text. Sometimes such additions are needed when translating from any language into another but they wanted the reader to know when they did it.
(But I think I just got off topic. Sorry.)

MiCrow
I loved your presentation. Was wondering if I could coax you into to doing the same analysis, but use ONLY the orginal stations that were present in the 1940s. Somehow, I’m thinking that some of the movement in the data are simply due to the increase number of stations in the data set.

MiCrow
I loved your presentation. Was wondering if I could coax you into to doing the same analysis, but use ONLY the orginal stations that were present in the 1940s. Somehow, I’m thinking that some of the movement in the data are simply due to the increase number of stations in the data set.

Thank you!
I have code to sort of do this, and in fact I ran a report for you last night, but it wasn’t doing what I wanted, apparently because it wasn’t working right I had disabled it.
But, if you go here, you should be able to email me directly. Once I fix my code I’ll send you the data you want. Note restricting it to only station that exist from the 40’s till now greatly reduces the number of stations. Normally I do include only stations that have data most of the year, and most of the years in the range of years selected.

MiCrow
I loved your presentation. Was wondering if I could coax you into to doing the same analysis, but use ONLY the orginal stations that were present in the 1940s. Somehow, I’m thinking that some of the movement in the data are simply due to the increase number of stations in the data set.

Dr Deanster,
I spent some time yesterday, figured out how to constrain reports correctly on minimum number of years per station, ran reports set to 71 (include only stations that have data in 71 years of the range of years specified 1940-2012) and like I suspected there are no station numbers that have been producing data for 71 years.
There’s a big discontinuity 1971 or so, I think it’s when they brought a large number of new stations on line. I will reset it to say 30? That should get me ones before and after the 70’s switch, as well as ones long enough to have at least a sample of climate vs weather.
But let me note, the charts you’ve seen would be very near this, I don’t think they will change much.
And I still need an email address, which you can get to a email form if you follow the link in my name here.

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